Subjects Archives: Political Economy

A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

Kate’s is a local bar in a far northeast corner of the Bronx.  During the day, elderly patrons wash away their remaining years in a sea of booze-inspired camaraderie.  I peek in sometimes as much from curiosity as to remind myself of a future I hope to avoid.  A few years back someone changed the […]

  As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]

  Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). As Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, I was delighted to learn that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins […]

A group of economists from across Canada are concerned about the federal government’s response to the auto crisis that blames the CAW for a crisis it didn’t create.  They’ve signed the following open letter outlining their concern that government pressure to cut wages will increase the risk of deflation and calling for new and focused […]

Some of the things Daniel [Ortega, President of Nicaragua] told me would be difficult to believe if they weren’t being told by him and if they weren’t happening at a Summit of the Americas.

Lenin in Imperialism had talked about a financial oligarchy presiding over vast amounts of money capital through its control over banks and using this capital for diverse purposes, such as industry; speculation; real estate business; and buying bonds, including of foreign governments.  The finance capital that Lenin was talking about belonged to particular powerful nations; […]

Any recession by definition is associated with an excessive liquidity preference.  An ex ante excess supply of goods and services, i.e. the demand for goods and services falling short of the base output at the base prices corresponding to that output, which is what a recession is, must be associated with an ex ante excess […]

While neither represented at nor excommunicated from the Port of Spain Summit we were able to find out what has been discussed there up until today. We were led to fully expect that the meeting would not be private, but the stage managers deprived us of that highly interesting intellectual exercise. We would be informed of the essence, but not the tone of voice, nor the eyes, nor the faces which so much reflect people’s ideas, ethics and characters. A Secret Summit is worse than the silent movies. To Obama’s left was a man whom I could not identify very well when he placed his hand on Obama’s shoulder, like an eight-year-old school student to a compañero in the first row. Beside him, standing, another member of the retinue who interrupted him to talk with the president of the United States; I could see in those persons importuning him the stamp of an oligarchy that has never experienced hunger and which, in the powerful nation of Obama, expect to have the shield to protect the system from the feared social changes.

  Default: The Student Loan Documentary is a feature-length documentary chronicling the stories of borrowers from different backgrounds affected by the student lending industry and their struggles to change the system. No matter when their loans were taken, many borrowers now find themselves in a paralyzing predicament of repaying two, three, or multiple times the […]

  The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009).  The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]

  Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981).  Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal.  ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8.  Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]

  Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February.  For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction.  At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]

As all working people know, April 15 is Tax Day, when we have to pay our annual financial tribute to the Powers That Be.  Naturally, we resent this, because we know that the rich and powerful hire expensive tax attorneys to make sure they get out of paying taxes, leaving us to foot most of […]

Anyone would think that after the Summit of the Americas, just 13 days after the G-20 meeting and on the heels of the exhausting tour of France, Germany, Prague and Turkey by President Obama, the world would have the right to rest for a few days.

Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate.  But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital.  The end result was […]

A huge chorus now clamors to heap new regulations on banks, credit markets, international capital flows, and so on.  Regulations, for many in politics, the media, and academia, seem to have become the magic bullet that will not only “solve” the current economic crisis but also prevent future meltdowns.  Many labor union and left voices […]

Deep economic crises violently interrupt daily lives and force more radical responses onto the public agenda.  In the case of the North American auto industry, however, that radicalism has been remarkably one-sided.  Absent an alternative of their own, workers were (and remain) trapped by their dependency on “their” corporations becoming stronger.  On the one hand, […]

  This article analyzes one of Japan’s most widely reported labor stories in recent years.  The unusual degree of national attention given to this incident is evidence that the labor question has become a central issue in Japanese politics.1  It also offers insight into critical shifts in the landscape of both labor politics and labor […]

Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1.  Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]