Subjects Archives: Political Economy

“When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938, “they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.”

Despite FTX’s collapse, a lawsuit linked to the exchange’s investor is trying to force regulators to allow crypto into the retirement market.

In my opinion, American capitalism no longer has any use for, let’s say, 40 percent of the population. These are the descendants of folks who were brought over here in one way or another during the period of capital accumulation. They’re now superfluous human beings.

John Bellamy Foster, Editor of Monthly Review (New York, USA) gives our annual Engels Memorial Lecture, joint with the Working Class Movement Library.

Capitalist and neocolonial fantasies are hampering a just transition.

THE post-second world war period had seen a spate of welfare state measures in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in Europe, in emulation of what the Soviet Union was effecting.

Challenging the western monetary system, the Eurasia Economic Union is leading the Global South toward a new common payment system to bypass the U.S. Dollar.

Money on the Left is joined in conversation with curator Emily Ebba Reynolds & artist Nando Alvarez-Perez, co-founders of the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, or BICA, in Buffalo, New York.
BICA is a new and distinctly heterodox arts organization, offering physical space for artist shows and educational seminars, as well as fiscal space for provisioning micro-grants to local artists.

With the Federal Reserve pushing up interest rates, we appear headed for a new recession.

It is in vogue nowadays to describe the multifaceted and intertwined crises of capitalism without referring to capitalism itself. Obscure jargon of ‘overlapping emergencies’ and ‘polycrisis’ are brought up to describe the complexity of the situation, and they serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations.

Reminiscent of Imperial Japan’s “Comfort Women,” the organized sex trade near U.S. bases in Korea involved horrendous human rights violations.

The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past.

While the inertia of the market-led nations gives us terrifying forecasts for the planet, state socialism in the east has delivered on wind and solar energy, green infrastructure, electric vehicles, reforestation and carbon reduction, reports CARLOS MARTINEZ.

China was once the world’s highest producer of soybeans, accounting for about 90% of the total. Currently, 60 percent of global soybean exports are destined for the Chinese market.

In the current calendar year an estimated $200 billion has already flown out of India which amounts to a third of India’s exchange reserves.

In 1845, Karl Marx jotted down some notes for The German Ideology, a book that he wrote with his close friend Friedrich Engels. Engels found these notes in 1888, five years after Marx’s death, and published them under the title Theses on Feuerbach. The eleventh thesis is the most famous: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’.

The demise of FTX, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume in 2022, and the second-largest by holdings, has sent a wave of chaos through global financial markets.

FTX had some eye-opening connections to powerful entities and individuals around the world before it all came crashing down.

Increased consumption of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019. That is the finding of a new peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

In 1973-74 the Planning Commission in India had defined poverty as the inability to access 2400 calories per person per day in rural India (in practice however it applied a lower 2200 calories norm), and 2100 calories per person per day in urban India.