Subjects Archives: Political Economy

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: “The outlook for LDCs is grim”. The latest United Nations (UN) assessment of prospects for the least developed countries (LDCs) notes recent setbacks without finding any silver lining on the horizon.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following: the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.

More than just bear it, capitalists today demand we love our exploitation. Sara Bennett reviews a new book on the new emotional demands on workers, arguing it aid us in our understanding of modern class relations.

Even patriotic Brits know that their hero Winston Churchill did not win World War 2 or fly a Spitfire. What they, and others, may not know is how his statements often shed a clear light on British imperialism.

Is there a growing resistance to the unipolar imperial order? Is the U.S. an empire in decline? Will the future be a multipolar one? If so, what does that mean ans how should the left in the imperialist core respond?

How 16th century reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture.

We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and the financial motivations behind the U.S. new cold war on China and Russia.

Discussions in the forthcoming COP26 should focus on democratisation of climate finance that enables procedural climate justice.

On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ‘recognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights’.

A discussion with John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s leading figures in Marxian ecological theory.

The bagels at Homegrown are some of the best in northern California, in part because the owner, Stuart Teitelbaum, who was born and raised in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, and grew up eating bagels and bialys.

In this bonus episode, Rohan Grey speaks with Philip Diehl about #MintTheCoin in the wake of this season’s debt limit showdown. Director of the United States Mint under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Diehl is best known today as the person most responsible for 31 U.S. Code 5112(k).

Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent.

In the 19th Century, “hypothecations” provided investors with valuable information on sovereign fiscal resources.

Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics.

Journalists from the U.S. and Europe have warned that the summer of 2021 should be a wakeup call on climate catastrophe. Rightfully so.

Financial globalization was supposed to spur development. Instead, it transfers money to the global North and exacerbates existing inequalities.

Many commentators and academics interested in African development have in recent decades shown a disinclination or disdain towards incorporating ‘global capitalism’ into their analyses of countries of the continent.

The get-rich-quick scheme, banned in China and elsewhere, is invading U.S. communities unchecked, posing as an “equalizing, democratizing” currency. It’s not.