Subjects Archives: Political Economy

COVID-19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn’t work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world. We are all floating on the same sea, but some are in super-yachts and others clinging to drifting debris.

The real problem with the World Bank’s poverty estimates, is that its International Poverty Line is set at an impossibly low level, which greatly underestimates world poverty.

The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration’s vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security.

Donald Trump’s attacks on Venezuela, Syria and Iran are criminal, but Joe Biden vows to be even worse.

The existing alphabet soup of possible recoveries—V, U, W, and so on (which I discussed back in April)—is clearly inadequate to describe what has been taking place in the United States in recent months.

Unemployment insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the majority of professors, from collecting compensation when they are unemployed. This situation is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need. This is a long overdue development.

This year marks 25 years since Ernest Mandel died. Mandel (5 April 1923–20 July 1995) was one of the most significant Marxist economists of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1982, he was central to founding our Institute. A prolific scholar and activist until the end of his life, Mandel wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles.

Radical Reviewer reviews Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business.

Talk about the decaying global capitalist system, the fascist aesthetic, the construction of “the other” and where we might be headed if we don’t do something quick.

The Accumulation of Capital was published in 1913, and it was probably only after completing her magnum opus that Luxemburg resumed writing her Introduction to Political Economy. Interrupted once again, now by the outbreak of war, she continued to work on the Introduction during her stay in prison in Wronke, in the German province of Posen, in 1916-17.

The system is the problem.

Too little has been made of the fact that countries like Laos and Vietnam have been able to manage the coronavirus; there are no confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in either country.

On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19.

Economist, musician & Money on the Left audio engineer, Alex Williams, joins the podcast to discuss money, music and method in light of Modern Monetary Theory and heterodox economics. At the outset, we chat about methodology and the riddles of “administrative capacity” that drive so much of Williams’ work. Next, Williams guides us through his […]

Third episode of VA’s “In Commune” series, focusing on the combative Panal 2021 Commune in Caracas.

Millions of U.S. households are already facing desperate crises.

Those still following international relations may have noticed an unusual tearing sound growing louder. Recent developments, not conclusive or complete and yet undeniable, suggest the painful ripping apart of that eternal brotherhood between the German Federal Republic and its great patron, provider and protector, the USA.

Being the biggest rich capitalist country, the U.S. also has the largest number of wealthy people. Quite how many will come as a bit of a surprise for those who have heard the ‘1% versus 99%’ slogan; it is not just Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

The Radical Reviewer and Mad Blender reviewing 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey.