The current massive oil glut is the product of the effects of the tight oil or shale oil revolution, which for a time turned the United States into the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Now, suddenly as a result of an overproduction of world oil, made far worse by the sudden falloff in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing the possible euthanasia of the U.S. tight oil industry, bleeding cash even before the oil price collapse and encumbered with mountains of debt. | more…
June 2020 (Volume 72, Number 2)
COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism
Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises
Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North. COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism. | more…
How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19
Overcoming the HIV/AIDS and Special Period crises prepared Cuba for COVID-19. Aware of the intensity of the pandemic, Cuba knew that it had two inseparable responsibilities: to take care of its own with a comprehensive program and to share its capabilities internationally. | more…
The Brazilian Crisis and the New Authoritarianism
Three decades after liberal democracy replaced the military dictatorship of 1964–85, the far right in Brazil has made a comeback, most starkly with the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Bolsonaro, however, is not an isolated individual; rather, his government is characterized by an authoritarian style of neoliberalism built on a series of alliances, a prominent one of which is with the judiciary. This coalition boasts connections with the military and police forces, the evangelical religious right, and agribusiness. | more…
German Deunification
Gerhard Schrder, Angela Merkel, and the Liberal Roots of German Neofascism
In 2021, Angela Merkel’s fourth and last term as the chancellor of Germany will end. To understand Merkel’s domestic and foreign policy, one must understand the country she inherited. She came to power in 2005 following the first center-left government since 1982, the government of Gerhard Schröder, and was in the fortunate position of becoming chancellor after a coalition government of social democrats and Greens had done the devil’s bidding of implementing very unpopular neoliberal policies to the sole benefit of German capital and the rich. | more…
The good-for-business wars
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
Culling the herd
A new poem from Marge Piercy. | more…
May 2020 (Volume 72, Number 1)
In its wider economic, ecological, epidemiological, and public health context, the current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enormous dangers of the metabolic rift in human ecology and epidemiology brought on by capitalist social relations in the age of monopoly-finance capital, global agribusiness, and intricate, globe-spanning supply chains associated with the extreme exploitation and expropriation of both human beings and nature. Neoliberalism, representing the inner logic of capitalism, has left the world vulnerable to catastrophe wherever it has come into play. | more…
COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital
COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients. | more…
Science and Politics
Hilary Rose, a sociologist, and Steven Rose, a neuroscientist, were two of the principal founders of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the late 1960s in London. They speak about their work as scientists and antiwar activists, particularly around the issue of Palestinian liberation. | more…
Engels vs. Marx?: Two Hundred Years of Frederick Engels
At the bicentenary of his birth, Frederick Engels’s reputation as an original thinker is, among Anglophone academics at least, at its nadir. Despite the recent global economic crisis and associated increases in inequality that have tended to confirm Karl Marx and Engels’s general critique of capitalism, Marxism is an optimistic doctrine that has not fared well in a context dominated by working-class retreat and demoralization. But if this context has been unpropitious for Marxism generally, criticisms of Engels’s thought have a second, quite separate, source. Over the course of the twentieth century, a growing number of commentators have claimed that Engels fundamentally distorted Marx’s thought, and that “Marxism” and especially Stalinism emerged out of this one-sided caricature of Marx’s ideas. | more…
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Climate & Capitalism
- Cars and drivers in the age of inequality June 11, 2020
- Banning wild animal sales won’t prevent another pandemic June 10, 2020
- Agribusiness drives severe decline of essential insects June 10, 2020
- Despite pandemic, CO2 hits new record June 4, 2020
- Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2020 June 1, 2020
- Deadly combinations of heat and humidity increasing worldwide May 21, 2020
- Pandemic: ‘This is a time for bold programs from the left’ May 16, 2020
- 3.5 billion people may face ‘unlivable’ heat in 50 years May 9, 2020
- Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, pork, and power in America May 8, 2020
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Michael Yates: Economist’s Travelogue
- What we sow is what we eat September 21, 2017
- A Land Grant in Maine: The Gift That’s Been Giving Since 1767 September 6, 2016
- Let’s Get Serious About Inequality and Socialism May 7, 2016
- Bernie Sanders’ “Political Revolution” February 29, 2016
- Geraldine July 7, 2015
- Dreaming of the Dead January 23, 2015
- Those Who Came Before Us* January 5, 2015
- Dolphins at the Hilton November 24, 2014
- Order-Givers and Order-Takers* October 27, 2014
- Sacco and Vanzetti* August 23, 2014
Commentary
- Fictionalizing Radical Activism of the 1960s, a review of Bryan Burrough’s book, Days of Rage
- Remarks on Capitalism and the Environment It Produces
- Strike at the Helm
- A Critical Reading of Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics (L’imposture économique)
- The Compleat Economist
- The Baran Marcuse Correspondence
- A Critique of Heinrich’s, ‘Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s’
- Response to Heinrich—In Defense of Marx’s Law
- Critique of Heinrich: Marx did not Abandon the Logical Structure
- Heinrich Answers Critics