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Capitalism

Trade War And Austerity: The Final Stages Of US Capitalism

April 14, 2025 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , , , ,
The Trump administration is imposing tariffs on a growing list of countries in a desperate effort to find leverage for protecting US interests abroad and to ostensibly re-industrialize the United States. Clearing the FOG speaks with Jon Jeter, author of "Class War in America: How the elites divide the nation by asking are you a worker or are you white?", about the motives behind the trade war and how this may impact both the global and domestic economies. Jeter explains that the United States is entering uncharted territory as it increasingly isolates itself from the rest of the world and hurtles toward another Great Depression. For the first time, the US may experience a situation in which the shelves are empty and families are unable to afford what is left.

When The Banality Of Evil Becomes Normalized, It Grows Unchecked

March 23, 2025 Rafael Sergi, Portside. , , , ,
February tends to be a pretty harsh time of year in Berlin. Freezing temperatures, short days, and perpetually gray skies weigh heavy upon the city’s inhabitants, amplifying an already fraught atmosphere in Germany. Amidst a persistently bleak economic outlook, the country is undergoing a sharp rightward shift, with traditional parties increasingly mirroring the rhetoric of the far-right AfD, to the point where the distinctions between them are becoming negligible. This shift has been accompanied by the criminalization and escalating repression of any movement, initiative, or individual criticizing the Israeli government’s actions, or expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people — the victims of what numerous experts describe as an ongoing genocide.

The Fog Of Class War

March 14, 2025 Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
The primary weapon of the ruling class is capitalism, and the greatest anathema to the capitalist construct is multiracial, multiethnic, and, intergenerational/intergenderational working class solidarity and militancy. This has been known since the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion, which occurred just ten years after the colonies’ so-called Declaration of Independence from the British empire. The significance of Shays’ Rebellion is multifaceted - not only did it represent a coordinated class struggle against the newly minted ruling class of the independent states, it also exposed the fickleness and abject hypocrisy of so-called revolutionaries like Samuel Adams.

Will Pakistan Remain A US Proxy Or Become A Regional Partner?

March 10, 2025 People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , ,
Pakistan is one of the largest countries in South Asia. Ever since its formation in 1947, it has been politically dominated by a coalition of landed and military elites who rule over millions of impoverished citizens mainly by force. Attempts to break this dominance and establish a truly popular government independent of the military establishment have mostly failed. Meanwhile, the ruling classes in Pakistan have been unable to industrialize and democratize the state. Their deep dependence on rent and the interests of the imperialists are in complete opposition to the popular aspirations and sentiments of the people.

I Saw Firsthand How Excessive CEO Pay Harms Workers And Customers

March 6, 2025 Kieran Cuadras, Inequality.org. , , , ,
"Remember the 2016 “phony accounts” scandal at Wells Fargo? Executives relentlessly pressured employees to meet extreme sales quotas, leading them to create millions of fraudulent accounts without clients’ consent. As these fake accounts grew, the CEO of Wells Fargo at the time, John Stumpf, raked in bigger and bigger bonuses. After the scandal blew up, regulators hit Stumpf with fines totalling $20 million — only a small dent in the estimated $130 million he walked away with in compensation when he resigned. This is just one of countless stories of CEOs taking reckless actions to pump up their own paychecks while putting their employees and the general public at risk.

Is Trump ‘Making America Affordable Again’?

February 28, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
US President Trump ran his campaign on a pledge to “make America affordable again,” following the inflationary crisis during Biden’s administration. But since the beginning of his presidency, the cost of living crisis, including the cost of staple grocery items and rent, has persisted. Peoples Dispatch spoke to economist Richard Wolff, who outlined that “prices are shaped by many factors, and only a few of those are under the control of any president.” “Trump did what American politicians usually do, which is take a cheap shot at his political enemies by blaming them for something bad going on in this case, inflation,” Wolff said.

China’s AI Breakthroughs Show It Is Outcompeting Monopoly Capitalism

February 21, 2025 João Romeiro Hermeto, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , ,
The Chinese company DeepSeek has made a major breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), with the release of its deep learning model R1. As the Financial Times put it, “With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates”. Until now, the West had deemed China incapable of innovation, and Western monopoly capitalism was considered the summit of technological development. China has quietly and gradually overcome not only crucial internal contradictions but, above all, impediments imposed by the West that sought to curb its development.

The Anastasis Of Marx

February 20, 2025 Arnie Saiki, oni’s Substack. , , , ,
If Karl Marx were to experience an anastasis and rise from the grave today, he might be both astonished and vindicated by the enduring relevance of his critique of capitalism in the modern world. Upon his first visit to a mall, how long would it take for him to get past the manufactured happiness that drives consumer culture and perverts his critique of production? Capitalism no longer simply estranges workers from their labor; it engineers desire, making consumption feel like fulfillment. The act of purchasing, of acquiring, is not just an economic transaction but an addiction, a temporary salve for an alienation that he once attributed to the separation from one's own production.

How Solidarity Economies Take Hold

February 20, 2025 Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy and Craig Borowiak, Next City. , , ,
In cities powerfully shaped by racial capitalism and economic exclusion, communities have long fought to reclaim their futures through economic solidarity and cooperation. This has been the case through the darkest stages of racial capitalist urban history and remains especially important in the face of a resurgent patriarchal white supremacy today. Our research, detailed in our new book “Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation,” reveals a striking pattern: The very neighborhoods redlined into disinvestment and organized abandonment decades ago have become hubs of worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens and mutual aid networks that, together, constitute the decentralized but vibrant solidarity economy movement.

Kerala’s Healthcare Revolution: A Triumph Over Corporate Greed

February 18, 2025 Anusha Paul, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
The New Indian Express reported on February 10, 2025, that Kerala has seen the closure of 99 private hospitals since 2011, citing the data from the Kerala Private Hospital Association (KPHA). The association believes this number is a conservative estimate, with the actual figure likely much higher. Hussain Koya Thangal, President of the Kerala Private Hospital Association (KPHA), emphasized that while the cost of treatment has remained relatively stable, the financial burden of maintaining infrastructure and running hospitals has increased significantly.

Socialism Or Barbarism: A Statement Of Fact

February 9, 2025 Matt Willgress, Morning Star. , , ,
Engels once said that capitalist society “stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Commenting on these remarks during World War I, the great socialist Rosa Luxemburg said: “What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilisation.”

US Tech CEOs Admit They Want AI Monopoly And ‘Unipolar World’

February 3, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The CEO of Anthropic, a US AI company backed by Amazon and Google, argued that the government must impose heavy restrictions on China in order to maintain a monopoly on artificial intelligence technology. If the US government can block China from getting advanced semiconductors, we will “live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models”, wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Calling for more aggressive sanctions on China, Amodei warned, “Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world”.

Betrayed By Green Capitalism, We Can Build A Livable Future

February 3, 2025 Peter Gelderloos, In These Times. , , ,
In one way of measuring it, the mainstream framework to address the climate crisis has been a huge success. Promoting green energy, electric vehicles, conservation zones, carbon credits, carbon capture, and other new technologies has made billions of dollars for companies like Tesla, Google, NextEra Energy, British Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, Tongwei Solar, McKinsey & Company, and BlackRock. Governments have gained power through increased interventions in economic planning, and authoritarian regimes from China and India to Canada and the U.S. now have a new justification to carry out land theft against Indigenous and rural populations.

Chris Hedges Report: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

January 30, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

Reclaiming Traditional Foods For A Degrowth Food Future

January 26, 2025 Christiane Heisse and Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova, Resilience. , , , ,
Crusty Bread, creamy cheese, bubbly kimchi or refreshing tepache – all cultures have fermented foods and beverages with their own traditions, language, and cultural heritage surrounding them. Fermentation, in this sense, is a living food culture that taps into ancient skills and traditional knowledge. But this knowledge is under attack. As capitalism continues its onslaught on rural, indigenous, communal, and non-commodified ways of life, traditional food practices are slowly dying out in the contexts in which they originally emerged.
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