Tag Archives: capitalism

I was hunting for the exact location of "Prince's Tavern" in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the "practical consequences" of reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers -- amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press -- to the reduction of working time. I'm amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to...

Last week I gave a lecture in the seminar series on Marxist political economy organised by the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Marxist Political Economy series is a course mainly for post-graduates and has several lecturers on different aspects of Marxian economics. Course Handbook – Marxist Political Economy 2019-20 (8)Mine was on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Not surprisingly, the department team has...

Americans debate not only economic policy but also their economic system. Is neoliberal "capitalism" fighting for its life against a rising trend toward social democracy in an increasingly unequal world?  WSWSGrowing attacks on socialism in Democratic presidential race Patrick Martin

After decades of rightwing dominance, a transatlantic movement of leftwing economists is building a practical alternative to neoliberalism.... The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy… The new economists’ enormously ambitious project means transforming the relationship between capitalism and the state; between workers and employers; between the local and...

Western dissatisfaction with globalization is wrongly diagnosed as dissatisfaction with capitalism, when in fact it is the product of the uneven distribution of the gains from globalization.... ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Why There Is No “Crisis of Capitalism” Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic...

After the crisis of 2007-8, capitalism has entered among some parts of the public opinion into an ideological crisis. (I have written elsewhere why I think that this is not a general crisis of capitalism but a limited response to the decline of western economic and political power.) However, the question of durability or of non-permanency of capitalism has, unlike in the years after the fall of communism, reentered the public discourse. In many ways, in the West, the situation is returning...

Has socialism's time come? Capitalists freak out at the prospect of a Bernie administration. Interestingly, what this shows is that an economic system is a policy variable in a social system.Mint Press NewsMedia, Democratic Establishment Panics as Sanders Predicted to Sweep All 50 States Alan Macleod

I have been reporting for months that the indicator we should all be monitoring is Real Gross Private Domestic Investment.... Forbes — Pragmatic EconomicsIs Falling Investment Spending The Last Nail In The Coffin? John T. Harvey | Professor of Economics, Texas Christian University

Global capitalism, with humanity in tow, is now facing a triple crisis: a deepening structural contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, one manifested as a multi-dimensional crisis of ‘valorisation’ – that is to say, a crisis in the production of ‘surplus-value’, the very lifeblood of the profit system; an acute crisis in international relations stemming from the fact that the global productive forces are bursting the confines of the nation-state system, whose individual units...

1. Profit as surplus labor or as a property-based claim One idea threatening to the defenders of the status quo is the recognition that profit income reflects capitalist property relations rather than productive contribution.…  2. Capitalist economies are demand constrained   The Keynesian or Kaleckian principle of effective demand may not seem quite such a hindrance to defenders of the status quo as knowledge of the nature of profit, but the motivation for its denial – at least in the...