The legacy
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
September 2021 (Volume 73, Number 4)
In 2004, Washington launched a whole new strategy of financial war, based on the role of the U.S. dollar as the hegemonic foreign-exchange currency, to cut off the economic circulation of targeted states. The United States has created, as part of its “rules-based international order,” a coercive global framework extending U.S. financial jurisdiction to every country, economic entity, and person engaged at any point in U.S. dollar transactions anywhere in the world. | more…
The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene
Assuming that the Anthropocene will soon be officially designated as the earth’s current epoch, there remains the question of the geological age with which the Anthropocene begins. Adopting the standard nomenclature for the naming of geological ages, the term Capitalinian is proposed as the most appropriate name for the new geological age, conforming to the historical period that environmental historians see as commencing around 1950, in the wake of the Second World War, the rise of multinational corporations, and the unleashing of the process of decolonization and global development. | more…
Building a Vision of the Good Life
The crux of Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living is simple: we need to redefine “the good life.” We need to move away from a culture that equates the good life with endless consumption and toward one that equates it with experiences that are not defined by the market. Not only is this transition ecologically necessary, but it will also lead to fairer, and far more pleasurable, experiences. | more…
Is China Transforming the World?
In most mainstream Western media, China is now presented as a threat, a conquering “empire.” Still the global hegemon, the United States is worried about the Chinese rise in strength, and their successive administrations are building the anxiety-provoking image of a China eager to supplant it and steal its leadership of the capitalist world system. | more…
China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?
Whether China has become an imperialist country is a question of crucial importance for the global class struggle. Although China has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters, on the whole, China continues to transfer a greater amount of surplus value to the core countries in the capitalist world system than it receives from the periphery. China is thus best described as a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system. | more…
China and the American Lake
U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence. | more…
The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War
One of the key components of U.S.-China strategic competition is the technology war, the essence and implications of which can be further understood in the broader context of the international division of labor and the two countries’ internal contradictions. From this front, we can decipher the antagonism between different classes/groups within and across the two countries. | more…
June 2021 (Volume 73, Number 2)
Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis constitutes a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts. | more…
Capital and the Ecology of Disease
The death of Salvador Allende in 1973 marked, simultaneously, not only the demise of one of the great socialist experiments, and the launching of neoliberalism; it also represented the loss in Allende of one of the great figures in social medicine. Nowhere has neoliberalism had more devastating effects than in the destruction of public health and social medicine initiatives throughout the world. | more…
Socialist Practice and Transition
In Socialist Practice, a collection of essays on leftist theory and experiences, Victor Wallis adheres to the view that the achievement of socialism is a drawn out, nonlinear process consisting of episodes that in many cases have a mixed impact on the revolutionary cause. He analyzes several, ranging from the seven decades of Soviet rule to the New Left of the 1960s. His main thesis is that over the last century pure socialism has never existed and that on all fronts socialist movements and governments have contained elements of the old—namely, capitalism. | more…
Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. | more…