I did not want to talk a lot, but he obliged me to expand on things; I asked some questions and, basically, listened to him. His words recounted the feats of the Chinese people in the last 10 months. Heavy and unseasonal snowfall, an earthquake that devastated surface areas equivalent to three times the size […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
“Prices Are Falling across the Board at Earlier Phases of Production”
The overall consumer price index fell by 1.0 percent in October, driven by an 8.6 percent drop in energy prices. The core CPI also fell in October, declining 0.1 percent primarily as a result of a 1.0 percent drop in apparel prices. Over the last quarter, the CPI has fallen at a 4.4 percent annual […]
South America: Recession Can Be Avoided
Can South America escape the wrath of the economic and financial storms that have their epicenter in the United States? Since the financial meltdown began in mid-September, the bond markets of most of the region (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela) have been hit, as well as most of their stock markets and a number of currencies. […]
Neoliberalism and Hindutva: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism
Over the 1980s and 1990s we witnessed the simultaneous rise of two reactionary political projects, Hindutva and neoliberalism, to a position of dominance in India. Such a combination is not unusual, in that neoliberalism is usually allied with and promoted by socially reactionary forces (such as the hyper-nationalism of the “bureaucratic-authoritarian” dictatorships in Latin America, […]
Obama’s Economic Advisors: Will Well-tested Enemies of Africa Prevail?
One of Barack Obama’s leading advisors has done more damage to Africa, its economies and its people than anyone I can think of in world history, including even Cecil John Rhodes. That charge may surprise readers, but hear me out. His name is Paul Volcker, and although he is relatively unknown around the world, the […]
Saving 7 Billion Environments
As I write this, the most serious economic crisis in 80 years is rolling across the planet. Only time will tell if we are now going into one of history’s U-turns or if it’s all just part of the normal boom-and-bust business cycle. And no one yet knows how badly humanity and the ecosphere […]
Developing Countries: Dangerous Times for the Internal Public Debt
Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly. This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries. While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]
Policies to “Avoid” Economic Crises
Recently, economist Joseph Stiglitz called the current crisis “avoidable.” He blamed it on “ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence.” In tune with the norms of his profession, he proposed “policies” to fix the problem. Debates over the worsening economic crisis increasingly turn on which “policies” to use to stop, reverse and “avoid” […]
The Unfolding Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968. In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]
The End of the Libertarian Bubble
The libertarian moment in U.S. bourgeois politics is quickly passing today. It was burning bright in the spring, when Ron Paul banners were hung from every overpass. Soon his books will be remaindered. Libertarians have nothing to say that will get a hearing in a period of crisis. Libertarianism can rationalize the economic success or […]
Capitalism and Climate Change
John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million [the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere], which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today — transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally. We have to aim at […]
Is the Financial Crisis the Achilles Heel of Capitalist Globalization?
金融危機是全球化資本主義的罩門？ 知名經濟學者阿敏專訪 Samir Amin: “It’ a monster, yes, it’s a monster, but it’s a monster which can be defeated also. This pattern of globalization, this pattern of the exclusive rule of dominant capital, that is, of oligopolies, is not acceptable and is not accepted. The breakdown is starting by the financial crisis, because financial […]
Capital, Volume One
Here is Capital, Volume One, pictured as a word cloud identifying 125 words that most frequently appear in the volume and representing the size of each word in proportion to its frequency (the more frequently a word is used in the volume, the larger it is in the picture). Click here to download the word […]
Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security
Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits […]
Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance
The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles. Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.” But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]
Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis: It Is Not Lack of Liquidity; It Is Insolvency and Lack of Trust
Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash. In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market. In such an environment of widespread […]
Capitalism Crashes, Politics Changes
This widening and deepening economic crisis is transforming US politics. New possibilities are emerging for activists and potential activists if they can see and respond creatively to them. One possibility follows from rethinking the Obama candidacy in the light of recent German politics. Obama has already garnered an historically disproportionate share of the campaign contributions […]
Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)
Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article. Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world. We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]
New African Resistance to Global Finance
Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the […]
World’s Labor Federations React to Financial Crisis with Proposals from Re-regulation to Socialism
Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]
