Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Replacing property with permission.

No amount of money can repair the damage which has been caused to the African people through the transatlantic slave trade, classical colonialism, and today’s neocolonialism. No amount of money can pay for that damage. The essence of reparatory justice is a just reconstruction of the world, an entirely new world.

In July 2025, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods in a failed attempt to stop the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was later sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup.

The irreversible decline of the U.S. empire’s global hegemony is not merely an economic or technological issue.

Brazil’s government announced Thursday it will immediately initiate procedures under its reciprocity law in response to the 25% tariffs imposed by the United States on certain Brazilian products, while attributing the dispute to the family of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Over the last decade, digital sovereignty has emerged not only as a technical debate about network infrastructure but as the central pillar of political and economic autonomy in the 21st century.

The world consumes about 100 million barrels of oil per day [bpd]. Before the war on Iran some 20% of that used to pass from the Persian Gulf region through the Strait of Hormuz to the world markets.

The thirtieth anniversary of the 1996 election is therefore not merely a historical commemoration.

Left unmentioned in the editorials is that Bezos’ empire—via his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS—holds billions of dollars worth of Pentagon contracts.

Guinea-Bissau’s geography had always made it profitable for smuggling–particularly in the Bijagós archipelago, with its more than eighty islands and complex coastal waterways.

The struggles over what kind of place we inhabit and what kind of people we want to be is a form of general political and social struggle that is central to what socialist consciousness must embrace. It is oppositional to the alienated and exclusionary nationalism that frequently attaches to the toxic form of developmentalism that too often corrupts anticapitalist politics.

Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire cohort took a chainsaw to needed government programs allegedly to save money but ended up saving nothing.

These toys of the ultrarich are environmentally destructive and multiplying fast. They should not exist.

A new report finds that governments worldwide are reshaping labour law to favour corporate power.

At the Marxism 2026 conference in Toronto last month, Ian Angus spoke at a release event for his new book, Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System, out now from Monthly Review Press.

Every year, unsafe food causes 866 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths, with young children suffering nearly a third of all cases of foodborne disease. This is the predictable outcome of a food economy organised around profit rather than the right to food.

State legislatures can intervene to help control costs.

Fire survivors say using prediction markets to gamble on wildfire is “morally reprehensible.”

This month, Scott Ferguson speaks with Mario Rendina about the politics of public employment and training in the United States as they shifted over the course of the late 20th century. Rendina brings over thirty years of hands-on experience working within municipal government in Tampa Bay, Florida—specifically within Hillsborough County. Grounded in his extensive career as a local administrator, Rendina walks us through the decades he spent supervising county initiatives, sketching out how local experimentation actively moved with and against broad macroeconomic shifts at the federal level.

Phosphate fertilizer is essential to industrial agriculture. Washington’s war on Iran has disrupted the routes that carry Gulf oil, gas, petrochemicals and fertilizer to the world market.