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Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Tens of thousands protest at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate

Millions march against climate change, capitalism and war

Four million people participated in the global climate strike across every continent on Friday, many of them students who skipped school on that day. Demonstrations at more than 5,800 locations in 161 countries began in Australia and the Pacific, moved to Asia, Antarctica, Africa and Europe, and then to North and South America. This is […]

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British Museum (Stop W), London

Marx in the Museum

One of Marx’s brightest concepts, perhaps his profoundest dialectical construct in Capital, is the “fetishism of commodities.” It emphasizes something very important about the foggy world of appearances and how can forget what lies within, behind what is immediately apparent. We can read it as a parable in which Marx tries to bring to life […]

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Bryan Cup

Money Politics before the New Deal with Jakob Feinig

Jakob Feinig, assistant professor of human development at Binghamton University, joins Money on the Left to discuss the history of political organizing and activism around money in the United States, from the pre-Revolutionary period to the New Deal era. Characterized alternately by periods of widespread “silencing” and mass mobilization, the history of money politics that […]

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Bernie Sanders

The workplace democracy plan, explained (Part 1)

Under the Sanders plan, federal contracts could be revoked or denied to low-wage employers, union busters, and companies that engage in offshoring (read: most American companies). Making federal funds contingent on “good behavior” is a powerful means of leverage.

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Marx on Taxation

Marx on taxation

“Marx on tax” is seen as an “empty box” by David Harvey in his latest book on Capital, but Marx and Engels had plenty to say about tax. Their tax theorizing is no anachronistic curiosity but perfectly applicable to the income and wealth inequalities of our own era.

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Economic Growth

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance

Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but ratherabundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014).

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us federal reserve

A rate cut that failed to please

On 31 July, the United States Federal Reserve System (U.S. Fed) announced its decision to cut its benchmark short-term interest rate by one quarter of a percentage point to a target range between 2% and 2.25%. It also announced that it would put an end to its policy of selling chunks of its holdings of […]

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Amanda : Flickr

Top 1% up $21 Trillion. Bottom 50% down $900 Billion.

The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.

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