Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Lindsey German on unfolding economic and environmental crises, and how we should respond.

China-U.S. ties would fall off cliff if Washington intended to crash ‘guardrails’.

The unthinkable is happening for the second time in five months: Russian gas giant Gazprom writes to German gas companies announcing force majeure effective from June 14, exonerating it from any compensation for shortfalls since then. 

Today the federal minimum wage is $7.25! Let that sad fact sink in. Right now you can barely buy a gallon of gas in some parts of the country with that little cash.

Dollar hegemony is the system where U.S. overseas military spending and other spending deficits result in U.S. dollar savings in foreign countries.

The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling–this time–as Rome drowns.

I just read this NYT column by Bryan Stryker, on how Democrats can win back the working class. I have no idea how its proposals poll, but as an economic matter, they will do little to help the working class.

Over the last year, real average weekly earnings fell 3.9% as inflation outpaced pay raises and average weekly hours fell by almost an hour.

There are many misconceptions about Scandinavian capitalism. A very common one is the belief that since the Scandinavian countries developed vigorous capitalist economies, without ever having acquired any colonies of their own, they constitute a clear refutation of the claim that capitalist development necessarily requires imperialism.

The population of the world is enduring crises from climate change that, until recently, climatologists thought may only happen decades from now. 

Kenny Coyle exposes the fake news fed to the world by the talking heads of the local CNN or BBC bureaus and beyond.

The world is adrift in the tides of hunger and desolation. It is difficult to think about education, or anything else, when your children are not able to eat.

It is a testament to the power of On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal that a set of interventions written across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic should remain so potent and resonant as we approach its fourth year.

Bernard D’Mello’s India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History is simultaneously a history of India’s political, economic and social development since the British Raj to the present; a historical retracing of the different attempts to build a revolutionary movement in India; and a political intervention into contemporary debates within the Indian left.

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors.

I find the best way to understand what happened in Xinjiang is to contrast it with Afghanistan.

It may seem strange to invite an economist to give a keynote speech to a conference of the social sciences. Economists have been characterized as autistic and anti-social in the popular press for good reason.

Samir Amin locates Cuba within the Latin American context, and therefrom, it acquires much of its specificity to him–but not all. While Cuba is the only country to challenge the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, or at least was, until Venezuela and Nicaragua came onto the scene; it is not only anti-imperialist, but also Communist.

Sri Lanka owes 81% of its external debt to US and European financial institutions and Western allies Japan and India. China owns just 10%. But Washington blames imaginary “Chinese debt traps” for the nation’s crisis, as it considers a 17th IMF structural adjustment program.

John Bellamy Foster explains the capitalist ‘solution’ master-minded by global finance to resolve the imminent environmental crisis: create a multi-quadrillion dollars worth of assets on the back of everything nature does and expropriate it from the global commons to make a profit. Worse still: it is already happening.