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Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024). What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.

2025 started off with many a bang.

The U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza has led to a precipitous loss in the population’s life expectancy. Even as the ceasefire allows aid to enter Gaza, this profound demographic loss will take generations to revert.

In the Basque Country, land is being expropriated in order to build a luxury hotel and seven people are scheduled to got to trial, facing a sentence of twenty years in jail and 43 million euros in damages. Once again, Spanish authorities are trying to criminalize popular protest. Read more about the movement and how you can help.

In this republished essay from 2017, John Bellamy Foster discusses how U.S. neofascism in certain ways resembles the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable. The time has come to revitalise higher education funding in the UK by extending what Cornell legal scholars Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova call ‘the finance franchise’ to universities.

As progressive governments take office in the Global South, now more than ever there is a burning need for a new development theory that can fulfill the Promethean aspirations of the darker nations.

Israel assumed that by destroying Gaza, it would eradicate the resistance. However, that calculation was deeply flawed. The resistance in Gaza is directly tied to the Palestinian people. It’s not about eliminating a specific number of fighters but about the enduring bond between the people and the resistance itself.

A statement from Katherine Franke, a longtime Columbia Law professor who was terminated after defending student Gaza protests.

Rafael Barrett has always been close to the hearts of Paraguayan radicals, who, along with his progeny, have kept his memory alive. And he is known throughout the Southern Cone of South America, though his work has suffered long periods of relative neglect there.

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear.

All this however is still in the realm of mere possibilities; what is more certain is the 10 per cent tax on global imports and the 60 per cent tax on imports from China.

I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark.… In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease. 

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Liberal opinion holds that the international monetary and financial system is a device for promoting the interests of all participating countries by providing a convenient payments arrangement within which trade can be carried on. The reality however is altogether different: the international system is founded upon the hegemony of western imperialism, and in turn sustains this hegemony.

On November 6 and 7, fascist goons from Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli professional football club, descended on the streets of Amsterdam, chanting proudly about murdered children in Gaza while assaulting local houses, passers-by, and taxi drivers that appeared pro-Palestinian or Arab.

John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

In Africa, the leading forces of capitalism have ruthlessly wielded a neoliberal conception of corruption to undermine states’ sovereignty and open the continent to plunder at the hands of Western multinational corporations.

In this republished essay from 1996, Samir Amin gives his view of Samuel Huntington’s theory of “clash of civilizations.” His demonstration of why culturalism and imperialism reinforce each other, and how victims can be led to accept “difference” in place of equality and liberation, is today of potential utility everywhere.