The Science of Corrosive Inequality | Nicholas Partyka
Analysis | July 26th, 2016
As the Presidential campaign season begins to get into full-swing, inequality will become a prominent topic, and misleading conventional narratives will
abound. Both the presumptive nominees of the two major political parties have addressed this topic at length already, and will certainly have much more to
say as the general election phase kicks-off. Inequality is a prominent topic because we are still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis
that spawned the Occupy Wall-Street movement, which did much to put the issue of economic and political inequality back on the table for discussion. This
is why the topic came up in the 2012 Presidential election cycle, and why during this election cycle one candidate in the Democratic Party's primary was
able to attract a very large following by focusing predominantly on this issue.
Expropriation or Bust: On the Illegitimacy of Wealth and Why It Must Be Recuperated | Colin Jenkins
Analysis | June 22nd, 2016
Beneath all of the political discussions lies an uncomfortable and overwhelming truth: Nearly all of our problems are rooted in the massively
unequal ownership of land, wealth, and power that exists among the over-7 billion human beings on earth. More specifically, these problems are rooted in
the majority of the planet's population being stripped of its ability to satisfy the most basic of human needs. This predicament did not happen overnight,
and it is far from natural. Rather, it is the product of centuries of immoral, illegitimate, and unwarranted human activity carried out by a miniscule
section of the world's people.
Gordon Gekko's America | Sean Posey
Commentary | June 9th, 2016
On October 19, 1987, a worldwide stock market crash-dubbed Black Monday in the States-interrupted the go-go 1980s. Only weeks after that panic-filled day,
Oliver Stone's meditation on the decade of greed, Wall Street, hit the theaters. The story of Bud Fox, a wannabe master of the universe, and his
Machiavellian mentor Gordon Gekko, served as a morality tale that America did not want to hear at the time. (The film proved to be far more popular in
later years than it was in 1987.) And many who did see the film deeply misunderstood its central lessons.
Brazil's Gramscian Moment: On Cultural Hegemony and Crisis | Jacques Simon
Analysis | May 20th, 2016
With the Brazilian senate confirming Dilma
Rousseff's impeachment procedure, it seems increasingly likely that Brazil could soon see the long-loved Workers Party (PT) out of office. Given the
seemingly unshakable support that the party had up until a few years ago, the deep political crisis that Brazil faces today may seem a bit surprising. How
is it that, after winning four consecutive elections, three by a landslide, the PT's Dilma Rousseff is now facing impeachment charges, and people are in
the streets by millions? Why have Brazilians completely turned their backs on the PT, despite it having enjoyed fourteen years of political hegemony?
Capitalism and Obamacare: The Neoliberal Model Comes Home to Roost in the United States - If We Let It | Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander
Policy & Research | May 20th, 2016
As the Affordable Care Act (ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare) continues along a very bumpy road, it is worth asking where it came from and what comes
next. Officially, Obamacare represents the latest in more than a century of efforts in the United States to achieve universal access to health care. In
reality, Obamacare has strengthened the for-profit insurance industry by transferring public, tax-generated revenues to the private sector. It has done and
will do little to improve the problem of uninsurance in the United States; in fact, it has already begun to worsen the problem of underinsurance. Obamacare
is also financially unsustainable because it has no effective way to control costs. Meanwhile, despite benefits for some of the richest corporations and
executives, and adverse or mixed effects for the non-rich, a remarkable manipulation of political symbolism has conveyed the notion that Obamacare is a
creation of the left, warranting strenuous opposition from the right.
Panama Papers: Capitalism Working Well for Obscenely Rich | John Passant
Commentary | April 27th, 2016
The Panama Papers show us, once again, that capitalism is a system of absolute greed. It is a system where capitalist governments help their mates to hide
their income and wealth while all the time businesses pretend they are paying their "fair share" of tax.
The 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca contain details of the 14,000 clients of the Panama headquartered company and the 220,000 shell
companies it has set up for them in tax havens around the globe.
Why tax havens? Not only do these countries have no or low tax rates they also have secrecy provisions which protect the income and assets of wealthy
individuals and companies from the prying eyes of state bodies like tax offices and company regulators.
Capitalism's Depleted Reserves: Recognizing and Preparing for Systemic Breakdown | Ben Peck
Analysis | April 27th, 2016
The capitalist crisis of 2008 was rescued by an enormous transfusion of public money into the banks. The system has been on life-support ever since.
Despite this, the bourgeois see little prospects of a recovery for their system. Rather, they wring their hands and impotently grimace in anticipation of
another slump. Many consider this now a question of "when", not "if".
An organism in crisis will begin to burn off its reserves of fat in order to survive. Austerity has been capitalism's economic equivalent of this process.
The system has eaten deeply into its reserves, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. All the accumulated reforms conquered by the working
class in the preceding historical period; relatively decent wages, the welfare state, pensions, etc; in order to pay for a system in crisis have been, or
are in the process of being, burned away.
Debt, Underemployment, and Capitalism: The Rise of Twenty-First-Century Serfdom | Cherise Charleswell and Colin Jenkins
Analysis | February 26th, 2016
Systemic contradictions of capitalism have only intensified in the neoliberal era. Structural unemployment, a phenomenon directly related to capitalist
modes of production, has continued unabated, creating a massive and ever-growing "reserve army of labor" that has been disenfranchised on an unprecedented
scale. Working classes, en masse, have been corralled into legalized systems of education debt with false promises of "middle-class" lifestyles, only to be tossed
into a job market that can no longer keep up with the system's inherent deficits and inability to provide a living wage to the masses. Massive inequality
and unprecedented wealth accumulation and concentration have paralleled uncontrollable costs of living and widespread housing insecurity for the
working-class majority.
Looking Beyond Capitalism: A Case for Parecon (Participatory Economics) | Michael Albert
Commentary | February 15th, 2016
People now fighting economic injustice have no right to decide how future people should live. But we do have a responsibility to provide an institutional
setting that facilitates future people deciding for themselves their own conditions of life and work. To this end, participatory economics, or parecon,
describes the core institutions required to generate solidarity, equity, self-management, and an ecologically sound and classless economy.
Parecon first advocates self-management by workers' and consumers' councils federated by industry and region as society's primary venues of economic
decision making. "Self-management" means people and groups have decision making influence in proportion to the extent to which they are affected by the
decision in question.
Radical Economics, Marxist Economics, and Marx's Economics | Jane Hardy
Theory | February 2nd, 2016
The major global crises of the mid-1970s and 2008-9 provoked debates among the ruling class about the best economic policies to manage capitalism. For
socialists and activists the question was different, and debates about whether and to what extent capitalism could be reformed to avert crisis and instil a
more humane and fair system became even sharper. By the mid-1970s the end of the (not so) long boom of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to sound the death knell
of Keynesian economics; in 2008 the shock of the near meltdown of global capitalism led commentators from a broad political spectrum to question the
efficacy of neoliberal policies, particularly in relation to deregulated finance. Since 2008 it is hardly surprising that there has been a revival of
radical economics and a proliferation of books and articles criticising neoliberal capitalism reflected, for example, in the popularity of the huge tomeCapital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
Overdrawn and Overworked: The Problems of Overdraft Fees | Devon Douglas-Bowers
Commentary | January 11th, 2016
We have all been shafted by overdraft fees from our bank at some time or another. It's an annoyance and frustration, especially to those of us who already
don't have much money as well as a constant puzzle: If one doesn't have $5, how are they going to pay an extra $35? Yet banks continue to do this and rake
in money, as can be seen by them having made $35 billion in overdraft fees in 2014. In order to get a
better handle on the problem of overdrafts, we need to understand the history of such fees as well as reframe how we look at the situation, changing our
perspective to see overdraft fees as a sort of loan rather than a fee.
Bank Crimes Pay: Under the Thumb of the Global Financial Mafiocracy | Andrew Gavin Marshall
Analysis | December 7th, 2015
On Nov. 13, the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10
individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement
shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.
To date, only a handful of the world's largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large
financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging. At the
heart of these scandals, which involve the manipulation of interest rates on trillions of dollars in transactions, lie a handful of banks that collectively
form a cartel in control of global financial markets - and the source of worldwide economic and financial crises.
A Special Kind of Humanity in Dark Times: How Students at the University of Missouri Are Bringing the Neoliberal Power Structure to its Knees | Jim Burns
Analysis | November 10th, 2015
The ineffectual institutional response, or perhaps non-response, to the hostile climate at the University of Missouri throughout the fall: racial slurs
shouted at the student body president and the Legion of Black Collegians; human feces smeared in the shape of a Swastika in a dorm; racist messages
delivered through anonymity's best friend Yik-Yak; ideologically-fueled attacks by the state legislature targeting women's health services and scholarships
for undocumented students; has claimed University System President Tim Wolfe and R. Bowen Loftin, Chancellor of the flagship campus. Under mounting pressure from students, the bad press generated by
hunger-striking graduate student Jonathan Butler, and a threatened boycott by Black football players, Wolfe resigned on November 9, and Loftin will step
down in January.
We Are More Than Commodities: 'False Consciousness' and Why It's Still Relevant | Colin Jenkins
Theory | October 22nd, 2015
Anyone who has ever taken part in a similar conversation with fellow workers knows that this fictional account couldn't be any more real, even over a
century later. While it occurred in an imaginary, 1900-ish English setting, it surely resonates in a 21st-century American reality where
collective working-class dissonance - what is referred to in Marxist circles as "false consciousness" - remains ignorant to the casual effects of
capitalism. The conversation is packed with the typically tragic ironies of impoverished, insecure workers searching for any reason to explain their
collective plight absent of blaming a system, let alone the faces of that system, which uses and discards them as it pleases. The lone conscious worker,
Owen, does his best to enlighten the bunch. The main opposition comes from Crass, a character who symbolizes the epitome of false consciousness, not only
in his ignorance of the system but perhaps even more so in his ill-informed, emotional pushback, which echoes the misleading narrative so often presented
through mainstream channels.
Capitalism, Exploitation, and Degradation | Dr. Nicholas Partyka
Analysis | October 8th, 2015
Our main question here will be, Is there morally bad exploitation in capitalist employment relationships? To begin I will examine Ruth Sample's excellent
account of moral exploitation, and contrasting it at points with the earlier view of Alan Wertheimer. The
subtitle of Sample's book offers us an interesting way to approach the explication of her view, and so I will in turn address the questions, What is
exploitation, and Why is it wrong? Briefly, Sample's view is that exploitation involves taking advantage for private gain of vulnerability in another, or
ignoring their needs in the transaction. This kind of behavior is morally wrong, as Sample suggests, because it fails to show respect for the exploited
party.
Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Authoritarianism | Riad Azar
Theory | July 24th, 2015
Ask anyone what neoliberalism means and they'll tell you it's an economic system that corresponds to a particular economic philosophy. But any real-world
economic system has a corresponding political system to promote and sustain it. Milton Friedman, who has become known as the father of neoliberal thinking,
claims in his text Capitalism and Freedom that "the role of the government … is to do something that the market cannot do for itself,
namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game."* While neoliberalism's advocates like to claim that the political system that
corresponds to their economic preference is a democratic, minimal state, in practice, the neoliberal state has demonstrated quite the opposite tendency.
"Thuggin" in Baltimore City: Capitalism and the Political Economy of "Breaking Slaves" | Asha Layne
Analysis | July 21st, 2015
As violence hit the streets of Baltimore City following the funeral services of Freddie Gray it became impossible to ignore the barrage of media coverage.
From local Baltimore news outlets like Channel 13 and FOX 45 to eponymous CNN, the world saw protests and riots throughout West
Baltimore as citizens responded to the racial and social injustices that are too common for American cities. At the forefront were the voices and actions
of young individuals who showed the world through action that they were going to be heard by any means - love it or hate it. In the wake of these riots,
many interpretations circulated of these actions and were condensed into one word: 'thugs.' By definition, a thug is a violent criminal, and when used as a
form of action, 'thuggin' becomes a behavior that mimics a criminal lifestyle.
Monopoly Capitalism in the 21st Century: Neoliberalism, Monetarism, and the Pervasion of Finance | Colin Jenkins
Theory | June 30th, 2015
With industrial or "competitive capitalism," it was the "separation and dispossession of the direct producers (the working class) from their means of
production" which created this multi-layered, class-based societal structure. Globalization has resulted in a massive shift of national economies.
Former industrialized nations are now considered "post-industrial" due to the ability of large production-based manufacturers to move their operations into
"cheaper" labor markets. International and regional trade agreements have facilitated this shift. With post-industrial capitalism and the widespread
destruction of "productive labor," or labor that produces a tangible product and is thus exploited through the creation of surplus value, it is the
complete reliance on a service economy which produces no tangible value that allows for strict control through wage manipulation. The ways in which the
working class interacts with the owning class has changed significantly, if only in regards to their physical worlds.
That Poverty Which is Deep: Recent Statistics on the Children of the Poor | Jeremy Brunger
Analysis | June 30th, 2015
Aristotle wrote in The Politics that "poverty is the parent of revolution and of crime." He was not writing in support of the poor and dispossessed, but
rather argued in favor of keeping the poor in check. He might have gone on to recognize that there is poverty, and then there is deep poverty. The confluence of the
negative effects of growing up in poverty, and around it, prove virtually boundless when explored by the sciences.
Social science and neurology suggest a profoundly
disturbing relationship between childhood development, the enduring lack of education to resources, chaos at home, and the cognitive limitations instilled
into children who grow up knowing little else beyond urban decay or rural want. It is a problem little discussed in formal politics because formal politics
is not for the poor; those unlucky enough to draw the long straws in the lottery of birth have no more advocacy than they have agency, and are often
treated as so much disposable matter by the political and economic machinery only nominally designed to represent them.
Causing a Scene: Neoliberal Urbanism and Spatial Production in Post-Recession New York City | Jacob Ertel
Analysis | June 9th, 2015
In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Foucault depicts the brutal public torture and execution of Robert-Francois Damiens in 1757 for
attempted regicide. Damiens' execution was intended as more than a spectator ceremony or an expression of sovereign power: it represented a mode of
discipline and a practice of social learning. Such rituals were soon outlived, however, as the unintended heroization of the victim through the
displacement of shame to the executioner proved politically ineffective. Torture as a public spectacle, according to Foucault, had mostly died out by the
beginning of the 19th century in lieu of more generalized forms of control such as prisons and asylums: "the tortured body was avoided; the
theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment."
The Poverty Machine: Student Debt, Class Society, and Securing Bonded Labor | Jeremy Brunger
Analysis | May 15th, 2015
At the dawn of the 20th century, very few American students attended high school, as the demands of the heavy-industrial and the agricultural
economies of that period were ill-suited to an extended education beyond the family sphere. In the middle of the 20th century, most Americans
who either aspired to or had to work entered the full-time workforce immediately after high school, for such a postwar economy featured plenty of growth
and comparably fair wage-compensation for the average worker. As the economy became more complex in its labor needs, its extending length of education
complemented these requirements. The transformation of the agricultural economy into the technological economy after World War II, in turn, transformed the
university, once the commune of the well-to-do, into a center for job training, an adjunct to industry, and one which continued to increase in enrollment
as the technological necessities of an increasingly complex economy required further education.
Why Comparisons Between the Boston Tea Party and Baltimore Riots are Wrong | Colin Jenkins
Commentary | May 5th, 2015
In 1767, British Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which included a tax on the American colonies for tea imports from Britain. For the next six years,
in order to avoid paying this tax, colonists established a significant smuggling ring with the Dutch, which amounted to approximately 900,000 pounds of tea
being shipped into the American colonies per year. This was viewed as a crime by British authorities. So, in 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act.
Contrary to a popular misconception, the Tea Act did not create a new royal tax on the American colonists. Rather, it was implemented for three reasons: (1) to
help boost the East India Company, which had fallen on hard times, by granting them the right to ship tea directly to the colonies as a duty-free export,
(2) to undercut the price of smuggled tea the colonies were receiving from the Dutch, and (3) to bolster and reinforce the tea import tax placed on the
colonies due to the Townshend Acts.
Overcoming the American Dream | Frank Castro
Commentary | May 5th, 2015
My house sat tucked a mile deep, wrapped in 500 acres of sprawling oaks and towering pines. Dense thickets crisscrossed the land like formidable barricades
protecting masses of forests from the intrusions of bored, yet curious children. They would leave you picking daggers from your sides and forearms if you
journeyed too far. I grew up in a remote place called Farmhaven, the midway point between Canton and Carthage, Mississippi. Driving through you would never
know you were somewhere with a name. Farmhaven is one of those places marked by only an intersection and a road that always goes somewhere else. It is here
though, with my father and my brother, in the heart of the South, that I learned the most important lesson life could teach me.
Will the Real Keynes Please Stand Up: On Keynesianism and Crisis Theory | Michael Roberts
Theory | April 22nd, 2015
An argument has broken out among top Keynesian economists about what is the Keynesian theory on economic fluctuations in capitalist economies (i.e, crises
and slumps). The debate has taken the usual form of arguing about what Keynes 'really meant', whether he was really a radical that
dispensed with neoclassical equilibrium theory or whether followers and supporters of Keynesian economic theory have distorted the master's ideas so much
as to reduce their insights to nothing. This argument reminds me of the unending one within Marxian economics that some of us have been engaging in yet again recently. Did Marx have a clear
theory of crises under capitalism in his works that he stuck to consistently; or were his ideas so sketchy that followers like Friedrich Engels distorted
them? And is the theory of value as the basis of
Marxian economics founded on realistic premises and logically consistent as a fundamental explanation of accumulation and social relations in the
capitalist mode of production? Moreover, does the theory fit the facts?
Curt Flood, Karl Marx, and America's Pastime: A Lesson in the Commodification of Labor | Eoin Higgins
Analysis | March 24th, 2015
Sports have transcended their genesis as simple recreation and have become factories that churn out athletes as commodities. Baseball, that oh so American
of sports, is hardly different. In fact, baseball's ownership laid the foundation on which many of the abuses of the athletes across sports are based.
Baseball is an industry. With phenomenal profits and exploitation of its workers, baseball has the mutual antagonism found in every business between the
owners and employees. This antagonism boiled over in 1969, after simmering below the surface for almost a century, when Curt Flood sued the Commissioner of
Baseball, Bowie Kuhn, for violations of antitrust laws and for denying him the right to free agency. Flood's suit went to the Supreme Court, where he lost.
In losing, Flood managed to prove the preposterousness of the Court's decision, and by extension, the concept of capitalist law.
Jumping the Left Shark and the Enclosure of the Social Creative Economy: An Interview with Fernando Sosa, the artist being sued by Katy Perry Corp. | Michael B. MacDonald
Interview | February 20th, 2015
I did not watch the Super Bowl but it only took me a few hours to learn about, and then see, the Left Shark that everyone was talking about. I wasn't immediately sure what the fuss was about.
Left Shark was a thing and it wasn't because Katy Perry decided it was (there was also a Right Shark that no one cares about), 'we' created Left Shark.
This is how the social production of knowledge and value works, an accumulation of individual decisions that has the impact of creating a valued
idea/thing. Left Shark is an idea that has quickly become a commodity. I'm sure many people did not even know what they wanted when they searched 'Left
Shark'. Perhaps it's a small Left Shark figurine, a downloadable file for your 3D printer, a plan for a costume? Either way, Katy Perry Corp. has
identified an opportunity to make money on this idea, if only they can get ownership of it.
Competing Visions in Economics as a Social Science: A Primer | David Fields
Analysis | January 7th, 2015
Economics (indeed every discipline of the social sciences) has never been, and never will be, value-free. Social scientists have always relied, and will
continue to rely, on sets of elaborate positions, perceptions, and views about the ultimate nature of reality; essentially, it is the
reliance on preconceived notions of how the world works, and how it should work, when analyzing manifest phenomena. Aspects of conscientiousness precede
investigation and thus one cannot separate the knowing mind from the object inquiry. What constitutes a fact perceives the observation and hence the
conception of what is determined as socially significant; the mind is active in constructing and determining the lens through which observation deciphers
what of social phenomena is worthy of factuality.
Paying Up: The Problems with Payday Loans | Devon Douglas-Bowers
Commentary | December 31st, 2014
Despite what the talking heads are saying, the economy isn't doing so well. With this most recent jobs report, the two main sectors of growth were fast food and retail, accounting for a total of about 32.2% of jobs created in October. In
part, due to low-paying jobs, many are using payday loans to get by and unfortunately when it comes time to pay up, many are paying much more than what
they borrowed due to extremely high interest rates. While this has been bought up in the mainstream every now and then, rarely has anyone taken a look how
payday loans came into existence and the type of havoc they wreak on people, mainly the poor. We need to realize that payday loans only harm us and explore
alternatives.
Zombie Apocalypse and the Politics of Artificial Scarcity | Colin Jenkins
Commentary | December 19th, 2014
Dystopian narratives have long been an alluring and thought-provoking form of entertainment, especially for those who take an interest in studying social
and political structures. From classics like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to the current hit, The Hunger Games, these stories play on our fears
while simultaneously serving as warning signs for the future.
Their attractiveness within American society is not surprising. Our lives are driven by fear. Fear leads us to spend and consume; fear leads us to withdraw
from our communities; and fear leads us to apathy regarding our own social and political processes.
Teaching Ferguson, Teaching Capital: Slavery and the "Terrorist Energy" of Capital | Curry Malott and Derek R. Ford
Analysis | December 19th, 2014
Critical education harnesses the present moment, looks to history to grasp the forces determining the present, and links it with social struggles in an
effort to push the configuration of the present beyond its breaking point. Given the recent non-indictments of killer cops Darren Wilson and Daniel
Pantaleo, critical educators across the U.S. and the globe are bringing the pressing topics of police brutality, state violence, and people's resistance
movements into the classroom. In this essay, we contribute to these efforts by arguing that the deadly and unpunished police violence against African
Americans requires not only an awareness of slavery, but an analysis of the relationship between capitalism and slavery, and the subsequent subsumption of
racism and white supremacy within capitalism.
A Review of "The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China" by John Bellamy Foster & Robert W. McChesney | David Fields
Book Review | December 11th, 2014
The Monthly Review, since its inception, has been carrying on some of the best works in radical political economy. Economists Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and
Harry Magdoff set out the analytical foundations of what has come to be called the Monthly Review School.
Karl Marx, having written in the nineteenth century, wrote about a particular phase of capitalism, which was predicated less on oligopolies than today,
although it was moving in that direction. In the best tradition of a historical-materialist approach, which seeks to understand the world as dynamic,
rather than static, Monthly Review writers have realized that the organization of capitalism has changed. While the general driving force, the structural
imperatives of increased expansion and accumulation of capitalism remains, the way it goes about doing so is inherently different.
The Silent Success of Cooperatives in the Bolivarian Revolution | Dada Maheshvarananda
Analysis | December 3rd, 2014
Solidarity, cooperation, and community empowerment are socialist values promoted by the Bolivarian Revolution in contrast to the individualism and
selfishness promoted by the corporate-owned mass media. Cooperatives are quietly transforming people's values in Venezuela, and the rest of the world,
though they have been mostly ignored by the mass media and by many political leaders, too.
The International Cooperative Alliance defines a cooperative as "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic,
social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise." Worker cooperatives develop trust,
solidarity, and teamwork.
