February 1, 2013
When the real estate market was building momentum during the 2000s, [new types of restructured, risk-based financial instruments] looked like a free lunch and insurers could pocket the insurance premium without ever being called in to make up for losses. However, when the market reversed in 2006, the payday came: some insurers lost heavily, others went bust, and a few, such as AIG, were bailed out. … By the end of the cycle, we had learned about the pro-cyclical nature of ratings-based structured products and the dangers of the new food chain. Hedge fund manager George Soros called Credit Default Swaps "weapons of mass destruction." We had, many believed, been defeated by novelty. Or had we? Many think that subprime products are new, and that the use of ratings to structure financial instruments and so-called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are a recent invention permitted by advances in modern finance. They ought to study the history of Levy Maybaum, a man who lived in New Jersey in the late nineteenth century and invented the first CDS.
February 1, 2013
Zhihe Wang's article "Ecological Marxism in China," which appeared in the February 2012 Monthly Review, demonstrated that Chinese interest in ecological Marxism has grown rapidly over the past two decades…. The practical, political, and theoretical reasons for its success include: pressing environmental issues facing China; the government's call for ecological civilization; the many characteristics that ecological Marxism shares with traditional Chinese Marxism; and the support it has provided for China's environmental movement. Numerous works by Western scholars, including Ben Agger, John Bellamy Foster, William Leiss, and James O'Connor, have recently been translated into Chinese. …In comparison [to the others], John Bellamy Foster's ecological Marxism was introduced relatively late. But recently it has drawn the greatest attention from Chinese Marxist scholars…. Our purpose here is to elicit a response from Foster on some of these developments in Chinese thought.
February 1, 2013
I would like to thank Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun, and Lichun Li for doing so much to promote a global dialogue on ecological Marxism by summarizing some of the insights and concerns of Chinese scholars in this area, focusing in this case on my work in particular. The various questions, challenges, and critiques raised in relation to my work and that of related scholars are all, I believe, of great importance to the development of theory and practice in this area. I am therefore providing a brief set of responses to the problems raised, which I hope will be helpful in the further promotion of this global dialogue on ecology and Marxism.
January 1, 2013
Sandwiched between revelations of mounting losses ($5.8 billion and rising) at JP Morgan in the face of bungled bets by a trader known as the London Whale, and allegations of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and breaches of U.S. sanctions by HSBC, the disclosures of deliberate rigging of the Libor rate by Barclay's Bank might appear mundane and a trifle boring in comparison. It is, however, this scandal about an arcane interest rate that most starkly exposes the rotten core of the global financial system.… [T]he scandal is not simply one of colossal greed and hubris. It is about systemic failure. It is about the fictions and illusions that form the basis of today's complex global financial system.
January 1, 2013
Within the current system, there are steps that can and should be taken to lessen the environmental problems associated with the limits of growth: the depletion of resource taps and the overflowing of waste sinks, both of which threaten the future of humanity.… [H]owever, …attempts to trace these problems, and particularly the problem of depletion natural resources, to population growth are generally misdirected. The economic causes of depletion are the issues that must be vigorously addressed (though population growth remains a secondary factor). The starting point for any meaningful attempt actually to solve these problems must begin with the mode of production and its unending quest for ever-higher amounts of capital accumulation regardless of social and environmental costs—with the negative results that a portion of society becomes fabulously rich while others remain poor and the environment is degraded at a planetary level.
January 1, 2013
Tadeusz Kowalik, the doyen of Polish political economists, died at his home in Warsaw on July 30, 2012. Kowalik is best known as the last surviving coauthor of the great Polish economist, Michał Kalecki (1899–1970), as an advisor to the Polish trade union movement Solidarity when it played a key part in bringing down the Communist government in the 1980s, and subsequently as a fierce critic of the capitalism that was put in its place. He challenged both the commonly accepted view of the Keynesian Revolution and the inability of Polish Communists to come to terms with their revolutionary past and find a place for themselves in the modern world.
January 1, 2013
Amory Starr, Luis Fernandez, and Christian Scholl, Shutting Down the Streets: Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 207 pages, $23.00, paperback.
Shutting Down the Streets is not an ivory-tower book, situated a safe distance from its subject; the first appendix lists the seventeen anti-globalization summit protests which were directly observed by the book's authors. And just as the authors were participants and not just spectators, they also refrain from merely presenting a comparative analysis of policing and repression at these summits. Examining the existing academic literature on social control, dissent, and social movements, they argue that existing works on repression mainly concentrate on protest policing. Instead they aim to develop a broader framework that examines social control by extending the object of analysis from the policing of protest events to the effects of social control on dissent, while also arguing that the unit of analysis needs to be changed from individual protests to the wider one of social movements. Repression then is not just police violence and coercion at protests but also includes a host of other methods of "soft" repression, such as psyops (psychological operations), infiltration, and surveillance.
December 1, 2012
In February 1967 came the Arusha Declaration. The ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), issued the Arusha Declaration and a policy of socialism and self-reliance. Our word in Kiswahili, Ujamaa (translated as extended family or familyhood), became the official policy. A number of companies in the commanding heights of the national economy were nationalized by the government. That started a whole new debate at the university. Walter Rodney had just come from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and became a young lecturer here. In the conference on rethinking the role of the university in now socialist Tanzania, he played a very important role.
October 1, 2012
From Tahrir Square to Wall Street, from Athens to Montreal, dreams of emancipation are mobilizing a new wave of revolts all over the world. Simultaneously the forces of repression are being unleashed everywhere to impose "new mechanisms of social control" with the aim of establishing "new conditions for achieving surplus value" in the aftermath of a protracted capitalist economic crisis.1 Some anticipated a Chinese popular uprising following the Arab Spring. Instead, since spring 2012 the world has seen a sensational drama of elite struggle surrounding the ousting of the Chongqing head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Politburo member Bo Xilai, including a crackdown on his Chongqing Model of development. Even though the CCP has been able to contain large-scale social unrest, divisions amongst the elite became a focal point of political struggle during this dangerous year of power transition in China. [T]
October 1, 2012
When the Arab peoples took to the street, they were not only shouting "The people want the downfall of the regime!" but also—and most of all—"Liberty, Dignity, and Social Justice." The absence of dignity and social justice points to the larger question of the neoliberal economic world order and the post-colonial states, which are integrated into the world-system, not as peers to the developed countries of the capitalist center, but as dependent peripheral subordinates. The desperate act of self-immolation by the young Tunisian produce vendor Mohamed Bouazizi poignantly illustrates the inequity of this global system. Zurayk's book is a severe indictment of how the cruel economic order affects agriculture and food sovereignty in the Arab world.
