Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The world today is witnessing a rather novel phenomenon, namely a pervasive tendency towards political uprisings by the urban middle class.  Not just the leaders, but even the bulk of the participants in such uprisings are educated, are reasonably well-off, and make extensive use of social media channels for keeping in touch with one another. […]

Throughout the previous period, PAME, the class-conscious movement, was at the forefront of the struggle against capital’s attack on labor and popular rights.  We will continue in the same direction, because the problems and factors that led the vast majority of the people to poverty, misery, and the loss of rights and conquests are still […]

“Has there ever been a demonstration where people chanted the name of a finance minister? This must be a world first!” says the ironic Xenia, a 53-year-old woman who has been shouting for several minutes, with thousands of demonstrators, the now omnipresent name in Athens: “Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis!”

  Bandera de la república popular de España en Atenas, entre las canciones Bella Ciao y Bandiera Rossa. #Syriza pic.twitter.com/HuVaAfO3Dg — ALFON (@TxabierAlonso) January 25, 2015 As a communist, if I were Greek I would certainly be active in the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and this Sunday the party would have had my vote.  […]

Greek Communist Party (KKE) MEP Kostas Papadakis firmly says: “SYRIZA has made very clear that it is not going to defy the EU or NATO.  We say: What kind of left is this?” “The EU has no fear of SYRIZA.  SYRIZA is not the oligarchy’s first choice, but it is the new face of social […]

“Vermont . . . is the only state with universal single-payer health coverage for its residents.” — James Fallows in The Atlantic, April 2014 For nearly four years, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has been basking in the glow of press accolades like the one above.  Unfortunately, what was often misreported nationally as a done deal […]

Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan.  In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies.  So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]

Dawn Paley is a Canadian author.  Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, November 2014) is her first book.  We conducted an e-interview as protests grew against police and military policies in Mexico and the U.S.  The drug war on both sides of the border has played no small role in generating such dissent. Seth Sandronsky: Can […]

Many Venezuelans think that fracking — the dangerous extraction of oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing of sedimentary rocks — is a conspiracy on the part of the United States to drive them into ruin.  That is not the case, but it is an understandable error, in part because of the US’s long history of […]

  This article was first published by the Hankyoreh on 25 November 2014; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.

5th Dr. BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi, September 27, 2014 I I would like to use this occasion to dwell upon a point to which Dr Ambedkar had drawn attention in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949.  In that speech he had underscored a […]

I. The Piketty Argument Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century embodies an immense amount of empirical research into the distribution of wealth and income across the population for a number of advanced capitalist countries going back for over two centuries.  In particular Piketty has made extensive use of tax data for the first […]

NYC Climate Convergence, September 20, 2014 A. The Environmental Crisis The “environmental crisis” is actually a number of crises, including the following: climate change; acidification of the oceans (related to elevated atmospheric CO2 levels); pollution of air, water, soil, and organisms with harmful substances; degradation of agricultural soils; destruction of wetlands and tropical forests; and […]

​Global capitalism has huge problems coping with the second worst collapse in its history. Its extreme and deepening inequalities have provoked millions to question and challenge capitalism. Yet socialists of all sorts now find it more difficult than ever to make effective criticisms and offer alternatives that inspire. Part of the problem lies with classic […]

Despite the prolonged global economic crisis since 2007/2008, neo-liberal economic thought and practice continue to reign supreme.  In his important book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Martin Hart-Landsberg makes a number of key interventions unraveling the myth of neo-liberalism as well as the dynamics underlying capitalist accumulation. First, he identifies […]

The Environment and Capitalism: Response to Ian Angusby Sam Gindin The most critical question confronting anyone concerned with the environmental crisis is the political one: how to build a social force able to do something about it.  The most important division among social activists is not between those who think an environmental collapse is imminent […]

This tribute to one of India’s finest radical economists first appeared in Analytical Monthly Review, May 2014.  AMR, published from Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Nirmal Kumar Chandra (1936-2014), referred to by his dear friend, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph (April 4, 2014) as “The Compleat Economist”, was in […]

Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project.  In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]

I have asked the editors of Granma to relieve me of the honor of publishing what I write on the front page of the official organ of our Party, since I am thinking of expressing personal points of view on issues which, for obvious reasons of health and time, I have not been able to present in the collective leadership bodies of the Party or state, such as Party Congresses or pertinent meetings of the National Assembly of People’s Power.

  On 10 June 2014 FIFA released a “Frequently Asked Questions” pamphlet “Setting the Record Straight” on what it purports to be some misconceptions about FIFA’s role and the socio-economic impact of the FIFA World Cup.  The release of the pamphlet is significant as it is the first time that FIFA has been forced by […]