Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Jayati Ghosh speaks about the growing debt crisis in the global south, the IMF’s never-ending affinity for austerity and the need to confront the power of financial capital.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx highlighted that “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.

Rising corporate profits have caused 45% of inflation in Europe, compared to 40% for rising import prices and just 15% for workers’ wages, according to research by IMF economists.

Mark Paul joins Money on the Left to discuss his new book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In his book, Paul scours U.S. political and economic history to recover, reclaim, and adapt the rhetoric of economic rights for our current political moment.

37 years after a 1986 International Court of Justice ruling, the United States still refuses to pay Nicaragua the reparations it legally owes. Today, the Nicaraguan government is demanding that the United Nations take action.

The saga of the OceanGate Titan submersible was the sort of story that rivets millions of people. Not only was it revealed that passengers paid $250,000 to see the wreck of the Titanic, but the vessel was poorly built, and its creator ignored warnings about its defects and continued to use it.

A Deeply Misleading Narrative: Answering the Claims of Cedric Robinson’s ‘Black Marxism’.

Spend less, work longer or get another job, move in with your parents or get a flatmate. But whatever you do, don’t push for a pay rise to compensate for inflation.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether AI can replace humans. It should be: why are some humans so intent on replacing the jobs that the rest of us hold, with AI?

Farmers from across the Americas are working together to envision a new food system based on food sovereignty and political justice.

Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou recently declared a state of emergency in the capital, Montevideo, due to water shortages.

Canada’s recent seizure of a Russian an-124 cargo plane, which had been delivering COVID supplies when it was grounded in February 2022 at Pearson Airport (it was forced to pay a fee for every minute, despite being trapped there), is another sanction among many others.

State Farm recently announced that it is halting new insurance policies for homeowners in the state of California, where the agency is currently the top insurance provider, due to rising “catastrophe exposure” coupled with inflating construction costs.

The No Cold War briefing above asks an important question: is an independent European foreign policy possible?

Even if Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito had not written Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the left today would still need to take the idea of degrowth seriously. This is because, economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

We ask a number of activists and academics to tell us what David Graeber’s work meant to them and the salient message it still carries today.

AFTER Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Bangladesh has become the third country in our neighbourhood to become afflicted by a serious economic crisis.

While a geopolitical tussle between Washington and Beijing over Zambia’s debt default has received significant international attention, Canada’s contribution has been largely ignored.

The 2019 Global Climate Strike—in which more than 6 million people from 150 countries partook—is a misnomer.

Last month, the U.S. National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, outlined the international economic policy of the U.S. administration. This was a pivotal speech, because Sullivan explained what is called the New Washington Consensus on U.S. foreign policy.