Subjects Archives: Political Economy

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.

Kevin Crane takes on some common questions about Artificial Intelligence.

Amazingly the world trading arrangements are such that the inferior mode of adjustment is carried out whenever there are imbalances, and not the superior mode of adjustment. This is the irrationality of the world trading arrangements under which we live.

Venezuela is rebuilding amid an information war that obscures the effects of sanctions, frozen assets, and decades of U.S. economic warfare–and turns human suffering into another pretext to discredit the Bolivarian process.

What is true of the world economy as a whole holds true for countries like India which have enormous labour reserves inherited from the colonial times, reserves hidden away in particular in vast agrarian sectors.

U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed a $1.5 trillion military budget for the fiscal year 2027, which would increase by 44 percent the acknowledged budget for 2026.

If Marx in Capital lays bare the “hidden” abode of capitalist production, Joyce, in Ulysses, lays bare the hidden (yet all-too-visible) abode of modern reproduction, the arena that’s both the starting and end point of progressive politics, decreeing its victory or defeat.