Articles
Currently viewing articles tagged with Capitalism.
-
The Labour Report
One might think that a prolonged and deep recession would provide the inspiration for socialist renewal. The contradictions of capital, combined with the insatiable greed of many capitalists, have once again revealed how this system doesn’t work for people who depend on selling their labour. But failures of capitalism don’t automatically lead to thoughts of socialism. If history can teach us, we should look beyond the labour movement for sources of new inspiration and leadership.
-
The Return of Mr. Keynes
John Maynard Keynes has returned from the graveyard of discarded and abandoned theorists. Blamed for the strange brew known as stagflation, Keynes’ economics had been unceremoniously dumped there in the mid-seventies. His economics was replaced by that rediscovered nineteenth-century concoction of deregulation, privatization and free trade that, under the rubric of neoliberalism, ruled economic policy making for the past quarter century. And so, the cycle turns.
-
The Great Recession
Capitalism is currently enmeshed in its most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression. And, just as in that earlier historic conjuncture, while visiting enormous trauma and privation upon working people, this crisis pried open the seams of the system in a way that opened up possibilities — too soon foreclosed — for a different tomorrow. So, the current crisis is a watershed, heralding both pain and the prospect of change.
-
Tinkering While Canada Burns
In the midst of the greatest economic crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression, and an accelerating climate-change crisis whose damages will be massive and permanent, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, chose to suspend Parliament to avoid facing the elected representatives of the people and being defeated in a motion of non-confidence.
-
Sewing the Seeds of a New World Agriculture
Tony Weis is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario, and he’s really stepped back to look at the big picture. His book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming is a lively, detailed, very readable survey of the global food economy. Ranging from the rich world to the majority world, his book is a scathing indictment of the “problems and iniquities of the world food system.”
Kuyek’s short history (just 125 pages) covers one hundred years of Canadian agriculture centred on seeds. Seeds are profoundly social, he writes: “they reflect and reproduce the cultural values and social interests of those who develop them.”
-
Better and Better Reasons for War
In his timely and keenly argued polemic, Humanitarian Imperialism, Jean Bricmont subjects left-liberal humanitarian rationale for war to the same kind of unsparing scrutiny as he and his co-author Alan Sokal did to the intellectual pretenses of postmodernists in Intellectual Impostures. But while the influence of the postmodernists rarely reaches beyond the confines of academia, the conceits of humanitarian imperialists have global implications and, with the saber-rattling against Iran, may yet lead to catastrophe.
-
Power to the Students!
Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University, and is well known for books like Alienation and Dialectical Investigations, and for well over fifty articles and commentaries on a variety of left-wing subjects. In this book, directed to American university students, Ollman makes a deal with his readers.
-
The Structural Roots of Hunger, Food Crises and Riots
In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes.
-
Promoting Intelligence
The Dope Poet Society’s front man, Professor D, strides on stage with a rapper’s typically confident air. Snatching the mic with one hand, he thrusts the other straight up, V-shaped fingers projecting peace to the thousands gathered at Metro Hall Square for the Global Day of Protest.
-
Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis
It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world — which now literally does encompass the whole world — has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally, as well.
- Page 4 of 5 « First < 2 3 4 5 >
