Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  CJP: What began as a financial crisis in 2007 has become one of the biggest unemployment crises in the advanced capitalist world.  Could this perhaps mean that the crisis of 2007-08 was not actually caused by finance itself but had its underlying causes in the real economy? JBF: No one doubts that it was […]

Capitalism and real democracy never had much to do with one another.  In contrast, formal voting in elections has worked nicely for capitalism.  After all, elections have rarely posed, let alone decided, the question of capitalism: whether voters prefer it or an alternative economic system.  Capitalists have successfully kept elections focused elsewhere, on non-systemic questions […]

  When Wisconsin state workers were courageously occupying the state capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on their unions’ right to bargain, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka trumpeted a call for solidarity actions throughout the labor movement on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, killed during the Memphis sanitation […]

Speaking about the then dictator of Nicaragua, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”  Whether or not Roosevelt actually said it in so many words is disputable, but there is no doubt that it — i.e., dictatorship is licensed in […]

João Pedro Stédile, second from left, speaks to the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti.  Photo: Beverly Bell. João Pedro Stédile is an economist, co-founder and co-coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, and leader among Latin American social movements.  He gave the following talk to hundreds of Haitian farmers at the 40th […]

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

Angela Merkel’s face usually displays a rather plain, friendly, almost benign expression, matching her simple, benign words.  But in rare unguarded moments, some claim, they glimpse a very hard visage, which is matched, equally rarely, by hardly benign words, like her annoyed statement that Cyprus was “exhausting the patience of its euro partners.”  Yes, Angela […]

  Do you think Marxism is still relevant today? If so, which parts? I think that Marxism is completely relevant for understanding capitalism now. It’s an error to think that capitalism has changed and that therefore we have to change Marxism. Marx grasped the nature of capitalism; and, although capitalism has changed in some of […]

Fred Magdoff: What I would end with is just a couple of ideas — not to give you a blueprint of another type of system but a couple of ideas of what it might be like.  I would say one in which basically the economy and politics are both under social control, under democratic social […]

When Hugo Chávez triumphed in the 1998 presidential elections, the neoliberal capitalist model was already foundering.  The choice then was none other than whether to re-establish the neoliberal capitalist model — clearly with some changes including greater concern for social issues, but still motivated by the same logic of profit seeking — or to go […]

The political calculus behind immigration reform was supposed to have changed after the elections of 2012.  The outcome of the elections, along with some basic economics, was supposed to have made the logic of legalization all but inevitable, setting the stage for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform early this year. And yet, we remain […]

  “The Third World Network and Jubilee are partnering today to stand up against vulture fund activity, stand up for Argentina, in this incredibly important court case that has massive repercussions for all countries around the world to be able to protect themselves from this kind of litigation in the courts by holdout vulture funds. […]

Labor historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have vividly described how sailors and other maritime workers were in the vanguard of the creation of an international working class.  Unlike most people in the early modern period who largely stayed rooted to the soil of their birth or tied closely to their particular artisanal enterprises, Jack […]

The depth and length of the global crisis are now clear to millions.  In the sixth year since it started in late 2007, no end is in sight.  Unemployment rates are now less than halfway back from their recession peak to where they were in 2007.  Over 20 million are without work, millions more limited […]

“An economic recovery has begun.”      — President Obama, Second Inaugural Address President Obama’s optimism — baseless as it may be — was surely appreciated at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.  For in what was described as the “most optimistic” meeting since 2007, 2,600 members of the global elite convened over the weekend […]

  Rebekah Wetmore and Ryan Romard (RW/RR): The crisis of world capitalism starting in 2007 was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and thus far the recovery, both globally and within Canada, has been weak at best.  With this mind, to what extent is the current crisis cyclical and in what […]

  Q. Can you comment on increased public outrage regarding acts of corruption and strivings towards achieving what is considered normal functioning of the capitalist system? A. The question is: Do we oppose the anomalies of capitalism or capitalism itself?  Corruption is vastly overrated.  Of course, it can reach proportions in which even the normal […]

On 27 October, 2012, Gennady Zyuganov gave a rather important speech.  Presented at the 14th plenum of the central committee, it sought to provide the framework for renewing and improving the theoretical work of the party.  But this is not any party and Zyuganov is not any leader, for the party is the Russian Communist […]

So the world didn’t end after all and the ‘Mayan apocalypse’ turned out to be another in a long line of doomsday-related tall tales and hoaxes.  No doubt a hard-core of Armageddon enthusiasts who really did believe — or wanted to believe — that the ‘Mayan prophecy’ was anything other than a load of cobblers […]

Sometimes history repeats itself — the first time as tragedy and the second time . . . as another tragedy.  The horrendous fire that just killed 112 workers, mostly young women, at the Bangladesh garment factory echoes the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City in 1911 that killed 146 workers, again mostly women.  Both […]