Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its April 2010 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. There are points when long-term trends emerge openly in the present, and a process normally visible only from a distance becomes an unmistakable part of daily life.  The […]

  CALL TO ACTION Organize Events in Your City! Confront Dow Chemical at the Dow/Live Earth Run for Water Tell Dow: You Can’t Run from Your Responsibilities! APRIL 18 2010, 8:00 am Dow Chemical was among the chief producers and profiteers of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.  In addition to wartime exposure resulting in […]

  An interview with Egyptian economist Samir Amin: his latest book reiterates his search for alternatives to surpass capitalism, which he describes as “a historical parenthesis”; meanwhile, processes of migration are building a planet of slums. “Memoirs of an Independent Marxist”: that is the subtitle of A Life Looking Forward (Zed Books, 2006), the latest […]

  Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt.  Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.  x + 261 pp.  $33.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-56639-448-2; $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56639-447-5. Between the Civil War and World War II the length of the American work week decreased dramatically.  Since the end of World War II, the rate of decline has become positively […]

  Andrew Fischer: The Chinese oversaving, I think, is a false argument.  If you say it’s because of Chinese oversaving, what you’re basically implying is that Chinese households save a lot of money because their consumption is being repressed because of industrial policies in China that take money away from households and direct it toward […]

One of the striking features of the recent period has been the diffusion of manufacturing and service activities from the countries of the core to the periphery.  The logic of competitive striving for the export market among the many “labour reserve” economies in the periphery leads to the accumulation of ever-growing reserves and a constraint […]

  What are the consequences of the implementation of neo-liberal economic philosophy for industrialization and development of poor countries?  The answer: de-industrialization of many low-income countries; destruction of their food production (influenced also by protectionist agricultural policies of developed countries), thus their heavy dependence on food imports.  The boom in commodity prices had improved the […]

As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted.  This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to roll over some of its debt, handing that job off to the […]

Harvard just announced its charges for the 2010-2011 academic year: $51,000 per undergraduate.  That covers tuition, fees, room and board.  It does not cover such things as clothing, books and computers, school supplies, room furnishings, cleaning expenses, travel to and from Cambridge, MA, and entertainment.  If we conservatively estimate these to cost another $9,000 on […]

On March 16, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that she was cutting millions of dollars from SBInet, a high-tech “virtual fence” that Boeing Co. has been developing for use along the U.S. border with Mexico.  Her announcement came just two days before the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) was scheduled to issue a […]

  Economist Heiner Flassbeck holds the German wage policy responsible for the problems of Greece. Neither the drastic Greek austerity program nor the proposed European Monetary Fund can help the euro zone out of its difficulties.  Instead, Heiner Flassbeck calls for higher wages in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to cope with the […]

  Zimbabwe’s land issue has generated unprecedented debates both within and outside the country.  The debates, which followed the dramatic occupations of white farms by rural peasants in the late 1990s, are generally polarised between those who support radical land reform and those who support market-orientated reforms.  The former stand accused of supporting Mugabe’s regime […]

  The austerity measures imposed on Greek workers to reduce the deficits are nothing but a prelude of what may happen to the other European countries.  The Greek crisis demonstrates the divisions in the ruling class on the strategies to adopt. For the second time since December 2008, Greece is at the heart of politics […]

The prospects for democracy, socio-economic development, and conflict resolution will suffer if the West continues to rely on punitive measures. This time, the warmongers’ silly season found its apogée in U.S. neo-conservative Daniel Pipes’ advice to Obama to “bomb Iran,” which appeared shortly after Tony Blair, having outlined why he helped invade Iraq, remarked ominously, […]

Alan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare.  Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end.  This was 2007, when he published his autobiographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. […]

The nation state is once again proving its special usefulness as a vehicle for managing capitalist crisis.  Partly, this follows from the renewal of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies.  Other key dimensions of state usefulness include its more direct provision of financial guarantees to private enterprises and its over-priced purchase of “toxic” assets (those that […]

China and India are generally regarded as the two large countries in the developing world that are the “success stories” of globalisation.  This success has been defined by the high and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income; and the substantial reduction in income poverty.  Further, both China and India are […]

  Democracy Insurgent is a majority people-of-color activist group animated by principles of democracy, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, queer liberation, Third World Feminism, and workers’ power.  We are based in Seattle, Washington.  We are a member group of the UW Student Worker Coalition.  Find out more at <nobudgetcutsuw.blogspot.com> and <democracyinsurgent.org>.  Contact us at <d.insurg@gmail.com>. | | Print […]

This is an exercise in historicization.  This lecture concerns the relation between feminism, the movements of second-wave feminism, and the recent history of capitalism.  My aim is to try to shed some light on where the feminist movement stands today in the current crisis of capitalism. So, I want to tell a story that has […]

Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is “delinquent.”  That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments.  Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions.  Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies. Mass media and political […]