Europe’s Economic Crisis: Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Belgium are Heading in the Same Direction as Greece

  It isn’t over until it is over. Of course, we are referring to Europe and its version of 1984. We find it profound that the bankers, politicians and bureaucrats of Europe can do what they have done with a straight face. Investor had a haircut shoved down their throats and the ECB, the European Central Bank and the IMF were exempt. How does that work? That ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

Farmer Suicides in India: Part 2

  This is a follow-up to our article on farmer suicides in India, Sanhati Journal, January 2012. We thought it would increase the clarity of the argument in the original article if we made some remarks on the following three issues: (1) Farmer suicides in comparison to state population, (2) Stagnation in the growth of yield, and (3) Imports of subsidized cotton and low prices. At the ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

Farmer Suicides in India -1: A Policy-induced Disaster of Epic Proportions

  Part - 1 1. Introduction Since 1995, more than 253,000 farmers have been reported to have committed suicides in India, making this the largest wave of suicides in the world. Other than a few conscientious journalists like P. Sainath and Jaideep Hardikar, the mainstream media has largely ignored this historically unprecedented event. Busy with crafting a palatable picture of “shining” India, the mainstream media has neglected its ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

The Great Inequality

  In the early 1980s, I began telling my students that growing inequality of income and wealth would become the dominant political issue of the future. I did not think that the future meant thirty years, but better late than never. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) uprising has put inequality squarely on the political agenda, with the brilliant slogan, “We are the 99%.” While the “99%” ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

Structural Crisis Needs Structural Change

  . When stressing the need for a radical structural change it must be made clear right from the beginning that this is not a call for an unrealizable utopia. On the contrary, the primary defining characteristic of modern utopian theories was precisely the projection that their intended improvement in the conditions of the workers’ lives could be achieved well within the existing structural framework of the ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

The Importance of “Socialist Accountancy”

  IN BUILDING THE NEW SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE To build the new socialist society, it is necessary to develop new, socialist concepts. We cannot proceed as if the categories and concepts of capitalism are applicable to the relations of associated producers (any more than the specifically capitalist mode of production or the capitalist state). Indeed, the Battle of Ideas requires the development of concepts that support social rationality ...
Posted on March 16 2012 Keep Reading...

1789, 1979, and all that…

  Against the wishes of the male French revolutionaries, their own actions let the genie out of the bottle.  To anyone who visits Iran today, it is quite clear the same outcome is occurring in the Islamic Republic - not in spite of the 1979 revolution, but because of it. The French revolution in 1789 not only set the template for what a revolution is supposed to ...
Posted on February 6 2012 Keep Reading...

Rebels without a philosophy

  If you want to defy authority, you should arm yourself with some ideas   A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old man named Jefferson Bethke produced a video called “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus.” The video went viral. It speaks for many young believers who feel close to God but not to the church. It represents the passionate voice of those who think their institutions ...
Posted on February 6 2012 Keep Reading...

Rebellion and reaction

  The mass uprisings of 2011 in the Arab world and in the Euro-American zone may have entirely different outcomes as the neoliberal framework crumbles. ON a global scale, the year 2011 was notable for two contrasting but interrelated features: a deepening economic crisis, especially in the core capitalist countries, and, on the political plain, a vast pattern of protests, strikes and mass uprisings in the ...
Posted on February 3 2012 Keep Reading...

WE ARE AT A TURNING POINT

  Much closer to the start of a great global revolt against the plutocracy Notes from  the Editors Monthly Review , January 1912 In a little more than two months at this writing (December 3, 2011) the Occupy Wall Street movement has ushered in a new dialectic of world revolt. Occupy movements now exist in more than 2,600 cities across the globe. The response of the system has been ...
Posted on January 28 2012 Keep Reading...