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When the concept of ecological civilization came to prominence in China, beginning around 2002 it was depicted as a defining element of socialism with Chinese characteristics, requiring a transition away from the expropriation of nature endemic to capitalist modernity and pointing to the need for worldwide social transformations. It was thus closely related from the start to the Marxist critique of capitalism.

While the rich embark on trips to space and fantasize about colonizing Mars, nearly a billion people have no access whatsoever to electricity.

Present, all too present, on the earth, capitalism is not present to it. It is global.

Am I mistaken in hearing echoes of grating radio voices from my childhood, in 1938, frightening even without translation, and omens of the giant tragedy which descended upon the world just one year later? Today’s tones are smoother, the words more circumspect, but I see election results in Spain, Italy, France, even Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, the wrecking of the Labour Party in England and news from many regions of the USA—and I grow fearful.

The Cuban Revolution came about in a country subordinated to the U.S. from all points of view. Although we had the façade of a republic, we were a perfect colony, exemplary in economic, commercial, diplomatic, and political terms, and almost in cultural terms.

Are you ready for Occupy 2.0? Hell Yeah!

Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin’s poetry in Chicana on Fire (2022) is testimonial and collective.

A key concept in Karl Marx’s Capital is widely misunderstood.

Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle

Frederic Heine joins Money on the Left to discuss his recent essay, “Performing Hard Money: Monetary Policy, Metaphor and Masculinity in the Making of EMU,” published this summer in the Journal of Cultural Economy. In his essay, Heine analyzes the cluster of masculine metaphors that ground  and mobilize the European Monetary Union’s hard-line opposition to soft money politics.

War is like a volcanic eruption in that it both exposes and obscures the clash of powerful forces.

It’s a momentous day! Not for the world–for which it’s nothing special. But for me!

What would Losurdo and Badiou say about each other’s views on Mao? Losurdo would likely consider Badiou to be infected with Western Marxist abstractions and anarchism in his celebration of mass rebellion and disregard for the needs of realism. By contrast, Badiou would no doubt consider Losurdo to be a Stalinist cop, with his defense of order, normalcy, and the bureaucratic party-state.

Dennis Meadows: Climate change, inflation, food shortages are symptoms of a bigger problem.

Money on the Left is thrilled to release English and Spanish transcripts from our Superstructure podcast with Daniel Rojas Medellin (@DanielRMed), now Coordinator of newly inaugurated President Gustavo Petro’s transition team (@petrogustavo), and Mexican economist Jesús Reséndiz Silva (@Tlacuachito). In the episode, co-hosts Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) & Naty Smith (@orangeasm) speak with Medellin and Silva about what it means to think beyond economic orthodoxies in Latin America.

Covid-19 and the Structural Crises of our Time (CSCT) is a very timely and important book, written by Mah-Hui Lim, a one-time sociology professor who went on to work in international banking, and Michael Heng Siam-Hang, a former professor of management studies.

As tensions between the United States and China rise, Washington is intent on contesting Beijing’s influence around the world, particularly in the Global South. The U.S. government has ramped up its efforts to influence international media and public opinion. In this new Cold War, South Africa is once again in the crosshairs.

Brett Scott joins Money on the Left to discuss his recently published book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets (Harper-Collins 2022). A committed advocate for financial heterodoxy, Scott grounds his perspicuous critique of “cloudmoney”–the conjoined efforts and outcomes of Big Finance and Big Tech’s drive to go “cashless”– in his anthropological training and work as financial derivatives trader in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years.

We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change.