Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The theatrical events of the previous week between Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have been grist for all manner of bourgeois media lies designed to obfuscate events.

In his address to Congress this week, President Trump boasted about ending “environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.”

The Trump administration’s volatility on foreign policy reveals internal divisions within Trumpism. But when threats and populism lose their momentum, the anti-communist hawks may get their way.

Michael Lavalette spoke to leading ecosocialist Ian Angus about capitalisms’ ecocide, Trump and what we need to do stop global heating.

Last month’s terminations cut employees who serve critical support roles on fires.

Slavoj Žižek, one of the Western thinkers who is familiar with Marxist terminology, published an article in Philosophy Salon on January 27, 2025, entitled “Why a Communist Must Assume that Life is Hell.”

A class consciousness among the working masses, one that takes the issue of race seriously, is critical at this moment. Still, the democrats are working to disrupt this effort to organize against the capitalist elite.

Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money. In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems.

The 2024 election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump makes clear that the U.S. has two right-wing parties and no effective left-wing opposition.

Nobody can claim that the rate of growth of agricultural production, especially of food grain production, has been higher in the neoliberal period than during the years of dirigiste development that preceded it; it may have been somewhat lower but let us agree that it is certainly no higher.

Ramped-up economic sanctions will immediately affect the country’s oil output and potentially trigger inflation.

The Argentinian president gifted Elon Musk a custom chainsaw, which he promised to use to drastically reduce public spending in his new role as the de facto leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The leading big tech companies are working hard to sell Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the gateway to a future of plenty for all.

In the basement of Helping Hands Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, there is a meeting room. Its left and right sides are lined with stacks of large books, some with torn covers. These are rare books about Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and others. They sit like prisoners, yearning for readers to set them free. The place is known as Harry Magdoff Memorial Library.

The larger rebrand underway is seeing elite “reconciliation” under Trump and plutocrats line up behind the repackaging from a “woke” empire to a more old-fashioned version focused on race, religion and more brazen exploitation.

The major economies are exhibiting signs of stagflation.

President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza.

Presenting new research, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel mount a devastating critique of the impact of structural adjustment in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on recent data on Africa’s material resource use, Sullivan and Hickel show how during this period structural adjustment programmes led to a significant increase in ‘unequal ecological exchange’, a process whereby African countries were compelled to export more materials, energy, and other resources than they received in imports. The difference between the two, Sullivan and Hickel argue, represented a transfer of real tangible materials from Africa to the capitalist world economy, for free.

The Trump strategy for the revival of imperialism amounts to having one’s cake and eating it too.

The clearest legislative priority of the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress is to keep taxes low for the richest households and corporations.