Mary Filippo began in 2004 to audit economics classes in the hope that she could “learn something about globalization. Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides?” She did not learn these things.
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
To the victor belong the spoils
The phrase, which was used in the early nineteenth century to describe the the spoils system of appointing government workers, accurately describes the American economy today.* And it’s pretty clear who the victor is, and it’s not the working-class. Instead, a small group at the top have come out as the victor—and that’s been true […]
You can’t understand capitalism without race
The centrality of race in the devilment of capitalism continues to be resisted by “the sort of hardline, orthodox folks who only look at class, alongside the sort of liberals and so-called racial multiculturals who have the misconception that race no longer matters,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College.
Why do we need to Transform Economics, and how do we do it?
First, a lot of it is simply wrong: that is, it is misleading about how economies work and the implications of economic policies and processes. For decades now, a significant and powerful lobby within the discipline has peddled half-truths and absolute falsehoods on many critical issues.
COVID and Kafala
To imagine that a country as structurally classist as Kuwait could have ever succeeded in fighting a pandemic that was born from exploitation and thrives on inequality is the kind of naivety one dreams of achieving, so comforting must it be.
Xi’s article on Marxist political economy in contemporary China to be published
An article by President Xi Jinping on opening new horizons of the Marxist political economy in contemporary China will be published Sunday.
Dear Future Generations: Sorry
An Apology Letter to Future Generations. Sorry.
Reflections on Marxism and Law: A Review of Igor Shoikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism
The book complicates the common narrative that Marx was the quintessential critic of liberal rights. Shoikhedbrod’s close and careful reading of Marx’s texts is insightful and targeted. The book helps readers to think about the role of law and rights under capitalism, and also to imagine its future in a communist society.
It is late, but it is early morning if we insist a little
Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.
Anti-laundering bill targeting shell companies stalled in Senate as big banks caught cooking books
The Anti-Money Laundering Act would expose the owners of shell companies now sits alone on a shelf in the U.S. Senate while the Federal Reserve shrugs its shoulders in the face of blatant manipulation by the too-big-to-fail banks.
Where is resistance to structural violence of capitalism?
The reality in the United States has come to this: 160,000 dead in four months, thousands hospitalized, and many thousands sick or afraid to be sick because they have no sick days and no health insurance.
Dead Zones: Industrial agriculture versus ocean life
Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.
Bolivia’s perfect storm: Pandemic, economic crisis, repressive coup regime
The rising toll of diseased and deceased from the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Bolivia particularly hard, in a continent that is now in the lead in global contagion rates.
Samir Amin
Samir Amin is, incontestably, the greatest intellectual—luckily, a Marxist!
The organic intellectual: Remembering Samir Amin two years on
‘In our era, when we consider the destructive (ecological and military) might at the disposal of the powers-that-be, the risk, denounced by Marx in his time, that war will end up destroying all the opposing camps, is real. The alternate path demands the lucid and organized intervention of the internationalist front of workers and peoples.’
Review of My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics
My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics is a document of the filmmaker’s darkly humorous journey through the mind-boggling constructs of mainstream economics.
The Internationalist Lenin. Self-determination and anti-colonialism.
In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.[1] The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled.
How the U.S. failed at its foreign policy toward Venezuela
On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams.
China & U.S. power
Can China do much to fight back against the power wielded by the U.S. in the world economy? At first sight, that looks unlikely. China is big, but world trade is conducted in dollars, and the U.S. has economic, political and military influence across the globe.
Trade and tensions between the U.S. and China
The Donald Trump administration uses every mechanism to cut China out of the global supply chain, but nothing seems to be working as a resolute China is unwilling to back down and dismantle its technological gains.
