Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The merger would create an international union of one million metal workers and miners. The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMSRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore […]

  What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class — both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class — in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power.  The secret of […]

Everyone is talking about China’s currency, it seems.  Amidst months of building tension, there is an apparent consensus among most economists, the financial press, and leading economic policy makers in the West that the renminbi is hugely undervalued, making China’s exports unfairly competitive.  The global imbalances created by such ‘mercantilist’ and ‘protectionist’ exchange rate strategies, […]

Abdallah Ahmed is an artist based in Cairo, Egypt.  He blogs at .  This cartoon was published in his blog on 17 May 2010 under a Creative Commons license. | Print

. . . But are the high interest rates that impose such a heavy burden on the budget inevitable?  What happened during the Second World War proves beyond a shadow of doubt that they are not.  In the war years from 1942 to 1945, the average annual deficit was 23 percent of Gross National Product, […]

The U.S. and European Union together make up about half of the global economy, and recovery is quite uncertain in both of these big economies.  Contrary to a lot of folk wisdom and political posturing, the problem is not irresponsible government spending in either case, but a lack of commitment by the authorities in both […]

The latest fad in business journalism is to sound the alarm about the United States having become the biggest debtor in the world.  This is intended to bring visions of our country sliding into a third world-type debt trap.  But even those who don’t draw such dire inferences nevertheless assume that a ballooning U.S. debt […]

There is a remarkable consensus among economists of all ideological and political persuasions — conservative, liberal, and radical — that capitalist economies must grow to be healthy, and that the key to growth lies in the capital accumulation or savings-and-investment process. Accepting this view, we have long been arguing in effect that capitalism, like living […]

  . . . Public debt levels as a share of GDP declined substantially in the Latin American region during the five years preceding the great global crisis of 2008 and 2009.  Data available for the largest seven countries in the region (LAC-7)1 show that the ratio of total public debt to GDP fell from […]

  Did you ever accept Keynesian economics, or did you go beyond Keynesian economics and feel his approach had lost the essence of what the problem was? One thing you should understand is that Keynesian theory permits an enormous variation in political and ideological positions.  Later on what Joan Robinson came to call Bastard Keynesianism […]

  Colin Leys is an honorary professor of politics at Goldsmiths College London, who has worked in the UK, Africa and Canada.  He was until recently the co-editor of Socialist Register.  One of Colin’s books is Market-Driven Politics.  A week before the UK general election Edward Lewis spoke to him about some of the themes […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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?   […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]