Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  • India: Forest Areas, Political Economy and the “Left-Progressive Line” on Operation Green Hunt

    As central India’s forest belts are swept into an ever-intensifying state offensive and resulting civil war, there has been a strong convergence of left, liberal and progressive arguments on Operation Green Hunt.  This note argues that this ‘basic line’ is problematic.  The line can be summarised as: The conflict is rooted in resource grabbing by […]

  • Clearing Up Some Facts about the Depression of 1946

    The Cato Institute wishes to erase away an entire recession: “You never heard of it because it never happened.  However, the ‘Depression of 1946’ may be one of the most widely predicted events that never happened in American history.”  But the facts are simply not on their side. If true, this would have been a […]

  • No Justice, No Euro!

    The current turmoil in financial markets around the world is another illustration of the damage that can be done by a bloated and politically powerful financial sector, combined with finance ministers and central bankers who identify with this sector and have their own right-wing policy agenda. Welcome to Europe, which has become the epicenter of […]

  • Electric Capitalism: A Discussion with David McDonald

    Prabir Purkayastha: You have written a lot about electricity in South Africa particularly, and you also talked about how this concept of services being priced so the cost of service is recovered is actually starting a complete ideological change in the way infrastructure services are delivered.  So what do you think is the real crisis?   […]

  • Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics

    Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water.  Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames […]

  • The Elusive Costs of Sovereign Defaults

      Abstract: Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses.  However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems.  To address these drawbacks, we examine the impact of default on growth by looking at quarterly data […]

  • Michał Kalecki

    Political Aspects of Full Employment

    This essay was first published in Political Quarterly in 1943; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. A shorter version of this essay was published in The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 1972). I 1. A solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a […]

  • South Africa: An Unfinished Revolution?

      The Fourth Strini Moodley Annual Memorial Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 13 May 2010 I In her historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the Great French Revolution through an illuminating character analysis and synthesis of three of that revolution’s most prominent personalities, viz., Maximilien Robespierre, Georges […]

  • Recessions: Better for Right Than Left

    For a long time, I’ve been critical of the left-wing penchant for economic crisis.  Many radicals have fantasized that a serious recession — or depression — would lead to mass radicalization, as scales simultaneously fell from millions of pairs of eyes and the imperative of transcending capitalism became self-evidently obvious.  I’ve long thought that was […]

  • No Sidestepping the Eurozone Implosion?

      A week ago eurocrats launched their campaign of overwhelming force designed to shock and awe the ”wolf pack” of professional speculators and institutional investors (hedge funds and pension fund managers) into a more docile, subservient position.  In the currency market, the shock and awe wore off after the first 48 hours, while, by the […]

  • Mr. Lula Goes to Tehran — Brazil’s Neocons React

    Brazil’s Ascent under Lula’s Leadership Under the leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has become a regional leader in Latin America with vibrant international foreign policy.  A look at the internal political dynamics of Brazil would be useful also.  During President Lula’s presidency, Brazil has had tremendous economic growth.  But in the coming […]

  • Interview with Gopalji, Spokesperson of the Special Area Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in a Forest in Jharkhand, Eastern India

    Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed.  What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India? The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism.  The 20th century saw the […]

  • Statement of Solidarity with the Students of Middlesex University

      On 26 April 2010, the management of Middlesex University in London, England announced that it was cutting all its philosophy programs and shutting down the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, the top-rated research department at Middlesex.  The statement below offers solidarity from Zagreb, Croatia to the campaigners to Save Middlesex Philosophy. — […]

  • Marxism Is the Mother Lode for all Critiques of Capitalism: An Interview with Alexander Saxton

    A longtime reader of Monthly Review, and a Marxist for all his adult life, Alexander Saxton might be one of the oldest, continuously active radicals in the United States.  Born in Manhattan in 1919, he met the novelist, John Dos Passos, and the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, when he was a young man, and […]

  • GM Crops: The Societal Context of Technologies

    The Bt brinjal debate has featured technological worries relating to genetically modified crops which appear relatively minor in comparison to the critical issue of who controls Indian agriculture and therefore food security in India.  While there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology — and therefore GM — will […]

  • Tricks of the Theatre

      The following statement by Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg was delivered outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on May 3, 2010 where supporters of Fahad Hashmi have been gathering since last October to bear witness to the inhumane conditions of Fahad’s detention and to call for an end to the US […]

  • Managing Liberalization and Globalization in Rural China: Trends in Rural Labour Allocation, Income and Inequality

      Abstract: China’s integration into the global economy, while rapid, has been managed as part of a wider liberalization process.  The structural changes in the rural economy arising from these twin processes have led to widening intra-rural inequalities.  To address these, the central leadership has, in Polanyian manner, moved to counter some of the adverse […]

  • Capitalism

    “Finally, light at the end of the tunnel!” Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist.  This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 24 March 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

  • Greece, Again: Demystifying “National Debt”

    Yet again, business leaders, politicians, academics, and media are blowing smoke around Greece’s efforts to cope with “national debt” problems.  Something far more important for the world than this small country’s financial travails is at stake.  Indeed, what is at stake affects us all.  What is happening in Greece parallels developments everywhere; only details and […]

  • Glimpses of Alternatives to Neoliberalism

      Social Justice and Neoliberalism: Global Perspectives.  Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning, and Katie Willis, eds.  Macmillan/Zed Books, 2008.  253 pages. Following the tradition of critical geographers, this book explores the expansion of neoliberalism into different spheres and spaces of everyday life.  It consists of a collection of essays by writers from the global South, the […]