Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Many would remember that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European socialist countries used to be characterized by long queues of consumers for several commodities.

“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

Capitalism is deeply unjust. It is a system under which labour power has itself become a commodity and is bought and sold on the market like any other object of exchange

We live in an age of unprecedented historical crisis. Its severity can be gauged by the fact that we are not facing a more or less extensive cyclic crisis of capitalism as experienced in the past, but the deepening structural crisis of the capital system itself.

In complete contrast to its founding ideals, the WHO is now captured by wealthy countries and corporations at the cost of millions of poor globally.

As the title reveals, Chukhrov is particularly interested in two aspects of Soviet socialism: desire and boredom. For a libidinally conditioned capitalist subject, socialism as a non-libidinal economy appears boring and unsexy.

During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that–counter to this general global downturn–China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean?

Taken together, these form a devastating critique of world renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept and theory of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.

A poem in remembrance of Glen Ford, whose untimely death on July 28, 2021, we deeply mourn.

Is fundamental, revolutionary change possible from within a social and economic system so shaken that questions of dual power are not likely to be raised?

The current complex of COVID-induced crises fits hand-in-glove with the system’s “normal” operation. Stability has been the delusional realm of a small sliver of the Global North, awash in post-World War Two imperialism and the repeated reinvention (and re-imposition) of various plantation systems of cheap and racialized labor.

Cory Doctorow joins Money on the Left to discuss what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) means for building digital commons. He walks us through his important critical genealogy of Intellectual Property law as well as his contribution to the urgent anti-monopoly accord called the “Access to Knowledge Treaty.”

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, U.S. Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation.

On 23 July 2021, a full-page appeal appeared in the New York Times calling on United States President Joe Biden to withdraw the vindictive U.S. blockade against Cuba.

Canadian mining companies own $2.5 billion of Burkina Faso’s gold, and the country is one of the most poverty-stricken in Africa.

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)

Many activists in the United States are working to build a movement for a Green New Deal transformation of the economy. Not surprisingly, a growing number look to the World War II conversion of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production for inspiration and policy ideas. 

Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households.

A Q&A on capitalism, media, and climate.

On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949.