Subjects Archives: Political Economy

“O there are times, we must confess To harboring a whim — we Like to picture old Karl Marx Sliding down our chimney” — Susie Day “Help fund the good fight.   By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel “To do my part, I just […]

“O there are times, we must confess To harboring a whim — we Like to picture old Karl Marx Sliding down our chimney” — Susie Day “Help fund the good fight.   By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel “To do my part, I just […]

The situation of the Arab Left is similar to “the phenomenon of the transformation of the Left” on the global scale and a reflection of it.  The reason is simple: the Arab Left, as a general rule though with some exceptions, was never a “Left” in the dialectical materialist sense.  It has always been a […]

The Los Angeles Times reports that Disneyland is retooling its boats-on-water rides because of the raging obesity epidemic in the United States, “to deal with the delicate problem of bottoming-out boats.” People are simply getting too fat for the existing rides, including the now satirically named “It’s a Small World”: “Forty-one years after the whimsical […]

Author’s Note:  The appearance of General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published recently for the US book trade by the University of Chicago Press, has created a stir because of charges of pilfered scholarship, damage to the reputation of UC, and the role of anthropologist Montgomery McFate in writing the book.  The mission of social science […]

The recent UAW ratification of the Chrysler contract that contains many of the same provisions that were adopted in the labor agreement signed with GM last month is another major blow to the jobs and welfare of US autoworkers.  Globalization, the Big Three’s grand strategy of pitting the workers of North America against one another […]

Everything went well during the summer of 2007.  The economy was in an upswing and stock-market prices rose even faster.  Then the end of the housing boom in the United States triggered an international financial crisis.  Up to now it has been contained by heavy central-bank intervention; but the euphoria is gone.  The world of […]

Understanding globalization, the main trend of capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century, is critical because of the many ways that it is undermining the lives and communities of working people in North America and around the world.  Few industries in the developed nations that are not specifically location-bound have been able to resist […]

What matters most in economics often gets the least attention.  So it is with the link between wages and productivity: what workers get paid versus the value of what they produce.  Most commentators focus elsewhere.  They hype what their employers want to see or what they want others to believe.  Stock boosters see market upswings […]

How do we mitigate climate change?  A fashionable suggestion is technologically intensive carbon sequestration.  That, however, is an excessively expensive and probably technically impossible method of capturing significant amounts of carbon.  Another popular suggestion for sequestering carbon is planting trees. A more traditional method — building up the soil — which is better for the […]

When the United States and its NATO allies started the war on Kosovo, Cuba immediately defined her position on the front page of the newspaper Granma, on March 26, 1999. This was done in a Declaration of her Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the title of “Cuba’s appeal to end NATO’s unjustified aggression against Yugoslavia.”

The ultracons have it all wrong and the neocons are glad that they do. The straw dog that the ultracons are beating to death in print and on the Internet is the chimerical North American Union, purported to be a supranational state that intends to override the sovereignty of the United States and subject all […]

Today’s two most conspicuous global flashpoints — the Middle East and Latin America — have widely exposed the fact of US imperialism and highlighted some of its limitations.  Adding the apparent cracks in US economic hegemony seems to indicate an empire in decline.  Yet a more cautious assessment would recall that the earlier defeat in […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its September 2007 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. No truths are more vigorously avoided, disguised and denied in our media than the disastrous and devastating results for the majority of the post-1991 economic “reforms” and the […]

In recent days, the US public has been satiated with a variety of press reports about numerous “new” plans aimed at addressing the US occupation and war in Iraq.  Some of these plans are rumored to include recommendations for an eventual withdrawal of all US forces from that country while some urge the Pentagon and […]

  In the big business media’s “two years after Katrina” coverage, there was one glaring omission — the story of the utter bankruptcy of the so-called Black leadership, in particular, the Black Democratic Party establishment.  Nothing confirms that story better than the brief appearance in New Orleans on August 29 of President George W. Bush.  […]

The authors of the most widely read book on financial panics (Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Fifth Edition, 2005) refer to them as “hardy perennials” and document how they have repeatedly devastated large portions of modern economies and societies over the last three centuries.  Charles Kindleberger (a professor of economics at […]

  NEW DEPARTURES IN MARXIAN THEORY by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff BUY THIS BOOK Being a Marxist requires considerable gumption — especially in the United States.  Those who take Marxism seriously in a hostile intellectual and political environment are only too aware of this struggle.  At worst, interest in Marxism is perceived […]

Let us refer to a famous poem by Mao that stirs excitement among us all: “A cuckoo is crying in the midnight until she throws up blood; she believes that her crying can bring the east wind back!”  We deeply hope our respected leaders will stir up the east wind! General Secretary Hu Jintao and […]

What will it take to shine a spotlight on the vast income gap between the very rich and everyone else in the US today, in the way that Michael Moore’s film Sicko exposes the injustices of privatized health care?  Ten years ago, on August 4, 1997, when 185,000 UPS workers went out on strike, they […]