The Puzzle of Financialization
March 1, 2023
In this reprise from October 1993, Henry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ask: "Isn't there anyone around here who understands how this capitalist system works?"
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Strategies for Degrowth
November 1, 2022
Mariko Frame reviews The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso, 2022) and its explorations of the policies, vision, and strategies for social change required for the burgeoning movement.
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Young Marx on Fetishism, Sexuality, and Religion: Revisiting the Bonn Notebooks
October 1, 2022
There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx's theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital, young Marx's initial exploration of the term has rarely enjoyed critical attention.
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The Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism
July 1, 2022
A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies.
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For an Ecosocialist Degrowth
April 1, 2022
Degrowth and ecosocialism are two of the most important movements—and proposals—on the radical side of the ecological spectrum.
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The Ecological State
February 1, 2021
Although natural constraints on supply are important, most economic scarcities that rule our lives are actually social and artificial. Supply and demand are not natural forces drifting through the air; they are contrived realities established by an interactive social environment involving governments, corporations, institutions, and classes. Supply and demand cycles are social constructs designed to answer a basic question: Who gets what?
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Hyman Minsky at 100: Was Minsky a Communist?
March 1, 2020
Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09, Hyman Minsky (1919–96) has been widely recognized as one of the late twentieth century's most insightful economic theorists. Nevertheless, if Minsky had still been alive at the time of the Great Financial Crisis, there would have been little likelihood that his new-found reputation would have resulted in his receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics given his heterodox and socialist economic views.
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Notes from the Editors, February 2020
February 1, 2020
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy is experiencing an unemployment rate that is at a fifty-year low. Yet, wage growth continues to be weak, with continuing wage stagnation even at the peak of the business cycle. A major and largely undertheorized reason for the sluggish wages in a period of seeming full employment is to be found in the fact that the new jobs being created by the economy do not measure up to those of the past in terms of weekly wages and hours, or in the degree to which they support households or even individuals.
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Liberated Capitalism
December 1, 2019
An interview with Henryk Szlajfer by Grzegorz Konat. Szlajfer was a leading figure in the student uprisings in Poland in March 1968. He was expelled from the University of Warsaw and was arrested and imprisoned for political dissent. He later conducted research in political economy focusing on the theory of monopoly capitalism, where he made major contributions, and coedited The Faltering Economy with John Bellamy Foster.
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Free Public Transit
December 1, 2019
Free Public Transit: And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators, edited by Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince, gives readers a distinctive blend of the visionary and the practical. It surprises us with rarely publicized instances in which quite sweeping societal transformations have been carried out. The matter-of-fact narratives, covering a wide span of national settings, allow us to envision new angles from which to confront some of the key issues of our time, from employment to civility to the rescue of the natural environment.
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