Lenin in Imperialism had talked about a financial oligarchy presiding over vast amounts of money capital through its control over banks and using this capital for diverse purposes, such as industry; speculation; real estate business; and buying bonds, including of foreign governments. The finance capital that Lenin was talking about belonged to particular powerful nations; […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
Excessive Liquidity Preference
Any recession by definition is associated with an excessive liquidity preference. An ex ante excess supply of goods and services, i.e. the demand for goods and services falling short of the base output at the base prices corresponding to that output, which is what a recession is, must be associated with an ex ante excess […]
Default: the Student Loan Documentary
Default: The Student Loan Documentary is a feature-length documentary chronicling the stories of borrowers from different backgrounds affected by the student lending industry and their struggles to change the system. No matter when their loans were taken, many borrowers now find themselves in a paralyzing predicament of repaying two, three, or multiple times the […]
The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis
Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981). Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal. ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8. Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]
China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment
The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009). The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]
Behind the “Tax Day Tea Parties”
As all working people know, April 15 is Tax Day, when we have to pay our annual financial tribute to the Powers That Be. Naturally, we resent this, because we know that the rich and powerful hire expensive tax attorneys to make sure they get out of paying taxes, leaving us to foot most of […]
Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February. For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction. At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]
Regulations Do Not Prevent Capitalist Crises
A huge chorus now clamors to heap new regulations on banks, credit markets, international capital flows, and so on. Regulations, for many in politics, the media, and academia, seem to have become the magic bullet that will not only “solve” the current economic crisis but also prevent future meltdowns. Many labor union and left voices […]
Patterns of Adjustment in the Age of Finance: The Case of Turkey as a Peripheral Agent of Neoliberal Globalization
Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate. But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital. The end result was […]
The Auto Crisis: Putting Our Own Alternative on the Table
Deep economic crises violently interrupt daily lives and force more radical responses onto the public agenda. In the case of the North American auto industry, however, that radicalism has been remarkably one-sided. Absent an alternative of their own, workers were (and remain) trapped by their dependency on “their” corporations becoming stronger. On the one hand, […]
Deconstructing Labor: What Is “New” in Contemporary Capitalism and Economic Policies: a Marxian-Kaleckian Perspective
Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1. Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]
Which Side Are You On? Hakenmura and the Working Poor as a Tipping Point in Japanese Labor Politics
This article analyzes one of Japan’s most widely reported labor stories in recent years. The unusual degree of national attention given to this incident is evidence that the labor question has become a central issue in Japanese politics.1 It also offers insight into critical shifts in the landscape of both labor politics and labor […]
Obama and the Banks
If we take a look at the recent self-described progressive US presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton), we will notice that their progressiveness invariably fades away, not even intentionally. That is because the beast compels them to align themselves with its own reality. Carter, who campaigned against the wage stagnation of the Nixon-Ford years, collapsed […]
China’s Way Forward? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Hegemony and the World Economy in Crisis
2008 — Annus Horribilis for the world economy — produced successive food, energy, and financial crises, initially devastating particularly the global poor, but quickly extending to the commanding heights of the US and core economies and ushering in the sharpest downturn since the 1930s depression. As all nations strive to respond to the financial […]
G20 and Inter-capitalist Conflicts
In the Financial Times of March 31st, Martin Wolf set down a straightforward criterion to evaluate the outcomes of the G20 meeting in London. Will they decide, he asked, to put forward a plan to shift world demand from the countries with a balance of payments deficit to those with a surplus? The underlying reasoning […]
The G20 and the HIRCs
A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of twenty nations in London in order to discuss the future of the world’s finances. They have invited some creditors among developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China, and India, leaving aside all the […]
Chávez Proposes Creation of OPEC Bank to Cushion Impacts of Global Recession
During his speech, the Venezuelan head of state insisted that “the agreements not remain on paper” as in previous years. He condemned the arrest warrant on the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, issued by the International Criminal Court “by order of the United States” and stressed the need to create a currency to confront the […]
This Crisis of Capitalism Is Not All Bad News
I think that what we’re going through now — which is really just starting, we’re nowhere in the middle of it yet either, I think — is much bigger and more extensive than the Great Depression. There are particular difficulties of fixing it because of the fact that it is bigger, it is more global, […]
Wanted: Red-Green Alliance for Radically Democratic Reorganization of Production
Private capitalism (in which productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and in which markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all […]
Interview with Alí Rodríguez Araque, Minister of Economy and Finance, Venezuela
The government estimates the growth rate will be 2% at the maximum this year. “The strategy is to create a public instrument in which the banks place certain percentages of their targeted portfolios.”
