“Has there ever been a demonstration where people chanted the name of a finance minister? This must be a world first!” says the ironic Xenia, a 53-year-old woman who has been shouting for several minutes, with thousands of demonstrators, the now omnipresent name in Athens: “Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis!”
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
SYRIZA’s Historic Responsibility, KKE’s Moment
Bandera de la república popular de España en Atenas, entre las canciones Bella Ciao y Bandiera Rossa. #Syriza pic.twitter.com/HuVaAfO3Dg — ALFON (@TxabierAlonso) January 25, 2015 As a communist, if I were Greek I would certainly be active in the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and this Sunday the party would have had my vote. […]
Interview with KKE’s Kostas Papadakis on Why KKE Does Not Support SYRIZA: “We Are Against the EU, NATO, and Chains of Capitalism”
Greek Communist Party (KKE) MEP Kostas Papadakis firmly says: “SYRIZA has made very clear that it is not going to defy the EU or NATO. We say: What kind of left is this?” “The EU has no fear of SYRIZA. SYRIZA is not the oligarchy’s first choice, but it is the new face of social […]
Shummy’s Surrender: Dem Governor of Vermont Goes South on Single Payer
“Vermont . . . is the only state with universal single-payer health coverage for its residents.” — James Fallows in The Atlantic, April 2014 For nearly four years, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has been basking in the glow of press accolades like the one above. Unfortunately, what was often misreported nationally as a done deal […]
The Political Economy of Austerity Now
Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan. In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies. So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]
An Interview with Dawn Paley, Author of Drug War Capitalism
Dawn Paley is a Canadian author. Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, November 2014) is her first book. We conducted an e-interview as protests grew against police and military policies in Mexico and the U.S. The drug war on both sides of the border has played no small role in generating such dissent. Seth Sandronsky: Can […]
Fracking Patria, Fracking Humanity: Capitalism and Its Doubles
Many Venezuelans think that fracking — the dangerous extraction of oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing of sedimentary rocks — is a conspiracy on the part of the United States to drive them into ruin. That is not the case, but it is an understandable error, in part because of the US’s long history of […]
Man Acquitted, 30 Years Later, for “Subversive Books” on Capitalism and Revolution
This article was first published by the Hankyoreh on 25 November 2014; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.
The Spectre of Social Counter-Revolution
5th Dr. BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi, September 27, 2014 I I would like to use this occasion to dwell upon a point to which Dr Ambedkar had drawn attention in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949. In that speech he had underscored a […]
Capitalism, Inequality and Globalization: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century
I. The Piketty Argument Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century embodies an immense amount of empirical research into the distribution of wealth and income across the population for a number of advanced capitalist countries going back for over two centuries. In particular Piketty has made extensive use of tax data for the first […]
The Problem Is Capitalism
NYC Climate Convergence, September 20, 2014 A. The Environmental Crisis The “environmental crisis” is actually a number of crises, including the following: climate change; acidification of the oceans (related to elevated atmospheric CO2 levels); pollution of air, water, soil, and organisms with harmful substances; degradation of agricultural soils; destruction of wetlands and tropical forests; and […]
Socialism and Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises
Global capitalism has huge problems coping with the second worst collapse in its history. Its extreme and deepening inequalities have provoked millions to question and challenge capitalism. Yet socialists of all sorts now find it more difficult than ever to make effective criticisms and offer alternatives that inspire. Part of the problem lies with classic […]
Unraveling Capitalist Globalization
Despite the prolonged global economic crisis since 2007/2008, neo-liberal economic thought and practice continue to reign supreme. In his important book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Martin Hart-Landsberg makes a number of key interventions unraveling the myth of neo-liberalism as well as the dynamics underlying capitalist accumulation. First, he identifies […]
Debate on Capitalism, Environmentalism, and “Environmental Catastrophism”
The Environment and Capitalism: Response to Ian Angusby Sam Gindin The most critical question confronting anyone concerned with the environmental crisis is the political one: how to build a social force able to do something about it. The most important division among social activists is not between those who think an environmental collapse is imminent […]
In Shared Sorrow: Remembering ‘Comrade’ Nirmal da
This tribute to one of India’s finest radical economists first appeared in Analytical Monthly Review, May 2014. AMR, published from Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Nirmal Kumar Chandra (1936-2014), referred to by his dear friend, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph (April 4, 2014) as “The Compleat Economist”, was in […]
On Capital, Real Socialism, and Venezuela: An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project. In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]
A Response to FIFA’s “Setting the Record Straight”
On 10 June 2014 FIFA released a “Frequently Asked Questions” pamphlet “Setting the Record Straight” on what it purports to be some misconceptions about FIFA’s role and the socio-economic impact of the FIFA World Cup. The release of the pamphlet is significant as it is the first time that FIFA has been forced by […]
Notes Toward a New American Marxism
When I first read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it was 1967 and I was doing my last book report for the nuns at Holy Family High. I would graduate in June but not without making some kind of statement about how angry I was to have been forced to attend this school. I was […]
The Accidental Controversialist: Deeper Reflections on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”
Thomas Piketty‘s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a six hundred and eighty-five page tome that definitively characterizes the empirical pattern of income and wealth inequality in capitalist economies over the past two hundred and fifty years, and especially over the last one hundred. It also documents the grotesque rise of inequality over the past […]
Venezuela: Making Peace . . . With Capitalism?
It was shortly after Moses’s encounter with the Burning Bush that God promised to take the people of Israel to the land of milk and honey. God, who could be extremely cryptic in his explanations (“I am that I am”), did not beat around the bush when it came to capturing his audience. For that […]
