06/Sep/2019 Building good financial health is a bit like building any other good habit – easy in theory but surprisingly hard to carry out. Eating a healthier diet, exercising more and managing your money better; working out what you need to do is the simple bit. Actually doing it can mean changing the habits of …
Author Archives: emmanuelperez33
Energy, Economic Growth, and Ecological Crisis
01/07/2019 Can economic growth continue forever? This relatively simple question has posed some intellectual headaches for modern capitalism. In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx argued that capital cannot tolerate any limits, by which he meant that the drive for growth and the search for new markets are both necessary for the political and economic survival of capitalism.1 Viewed …
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Late Imperialism
01/07/2019 The single most influential work on imperialism remains V. I. Lenin’s classic study of a century ago, Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism (better known by the title given to it following its first publication, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism).1 Lenin employed the term modern imperialism or simply imperialism to refer to the age of concentrated capital, during which the entire …
Fighting for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong
01/02/2019 The precarious state of migrant workers has become a major area of concern for the contemporary global economy. In Southeast Asian regions in particular, the number of migrant workers has spiked since the 1990s. In the city of Hong Kong, domestic migrant workers, predominantly Filipino and Indonesian women, now make up around a tenth …
California’s Migrant Farmworkers
01/05/2019 Gabriel Thompson, ed., Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture (New York: Verso, 2017), 320 pages, $24.95, paperback. California is by far the most important source of fruits, vegetables, nuts, dairy, meat, and other products of the U.S. food system. The list of U.S.- grown foods produced almost exclusively in California by the state’s roughly …
Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?
01/02/2019 Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can …
A Predatory System
01/04/2019 Over two decades ago, the financialization of capitalism joined the list of topics most hotly discussed by intellectuals and economists who follow Marxist theory. François Chesnais was one of the first authors among them to address the topic directly. A closing chapter of his 1994 book La mondialisation du capital, which studied the reorganization of …
Absolute Capitalism
01/05/2019 The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1864 that “the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!”1 I will argue here that this is directly applicable to today’s neoliberals, whose devil’s ruse is to pretend they do not exist. Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-ideological project …
Owning Financialization
01/04/2019 In the Notes from the Editors of the January 2019 issue of Monthly Review, the editors commented on a blog post of mine dealing with the term financialization and whether it is a meaningful and useful description of or hypothesis about modern capitalism.1 While the editors did not deal with my arguments on that issue, they took me to …
Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End
01/07/2019 Harry Magdoff’s The Age of Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it follows in V. I. Lenin’s footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at the time operated globally. On the other …
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