The following is taken from the November issue of Monthly Review. If we take the categories of the unemployed, the vulnerably employed, and the economically inactive population in prime working ages (25–54) and add them together, we come up with what might be called the maximum size of the global reserve army in 2011: some 2.4 billion [...]
Posts under ‘Political Economy’
Some contributions to thinking in the present moment
There’s a new wind blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to [...]
Global Corporate Networks
Image at right: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue. The fact of highly concentrated global capitalist networks — as well as the related question of a transnational capitalist class — will be familiar ones [...]
Financialization and hegemony
How does (or can) theoretical investigations relate to the rapidly developing “Occupy….” movement? This is a question I was asked recently, and to which I don’t have a ready answer. But the following essay covers a lot of important ground whose relationship to the present moment should be clear — the need for a revolutionary subject, [...]
Can capitalism exit from this crisis?
Perhaps it’s time to resume some discussion of the economic crisis. The author of the following, Anselm Jappe, teaches philosophy in Italy and is a member of the Krisis-Gruppe. Translated from the Spanish translation posted at Comunización: Materiales para una concepción integral del movimiento comunista, and republished here from libcom. Who Is To Blame? Anselm Jappe [...]
What will happen in China?
It’s obvious that what happens in China will be of crucial importance for the future course of world history. Western analysts tend to play variations on the theme of China becoming the new world hegemon — even Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing) seems not far removed from this. Could there be a more emancipatory possibility? [...]
A crisis of financial hegemony?
The exploration and debate on the causes and explanatory framework for the current capitalist crisis is ongoing among broadly Marxist circles. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy represent a prominent point of view within this debate. The two are (I believe – and in company with many others) former students of Althusser who have worked collaboratively [...]
China, jobs, and the global economy
Many more people have entered the industrial proletariat over the past 25 years in China (and some other countries of East and South Asia), I have heard it claimed, than the number of industrial jobs lost in the US and other Western countries in the same period. But — according to the following piece — [...]
Doesn’t the class struggle affect economic developments?
We’ve posted a number of essays on this site relating to analyses of the current crisis, the trans-nationalization of capital (etc.), their effects on social structures and the conditions of the people, and the implications of all of this for politics and class struggle. But don’t implications run both ways? Nat W. has been an [...]
Does contemporary capitalism tend toward fascism?
We’ve had posts and discussions here on the existence, configuration and functioning of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), mostly on a fairly theoretical plane (as befits khukuri’s function). But, presuming we accept the TCC thesis, what are the effects on a more current-event and political level? Robinson’s essay sketches a series of theses along these [...]
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