Tag: growth

CAPITALISM COULD COST US THE EARTH!

Leave a comment

8 October 2018 — The Planning Motive

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just released its report on Global Warning. Global temperatures broke through the 1 Degree barrier in 2017 and will breach the planet altering threshold of +1.5 Degrees sometime in the next ten to twenty years. The IPCC has produced a vivid graph showing the thresholds:report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_fig1.pdfThe only important point to come out of this report is that capitalism is not slowing down this rise, never mind reversing it. It confirms that capitalism is putting society together with the planet, in harm’s way.

Continue reading →

The Debtor’s War: A Modern Greek Tragedy By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Leave a comment

7 November 2013 — Andrew Gavin Marshall

Early on Thursday, 7 November 2013, Greek riot police stormed the offices of Greece’s main public broadcaster, which had been under a five-month occupation by workers who opposed the government’s decision to shut down the broadcaster, firing thousands and destroying a major cultural institution. The broadcast seems to have come to an end.

A Brave New Transatlantic Partnership: The Social and Environmental Consequences of the Proposed EU-US Trade Deal

Leave a comment

14 October 2013 — corporateeurope.org

As the second round of negotiations on the EU-US trade agreement kick off in Brussels next week, a new report published by members of the Seattle to Brussels Network (S2B), including CEO, reveals the true human and environmental costs of the proposed deal.

Video: The Impact of Robots: Abundance and the Need for Radical Structural Reform

Leave a comment

1 September 2013 — Solidarity Economy

Marx anticipated the problem as capitalism’s systemic crisis, the growth in the ‘organic composition of capital’ (machines) in an inverse relation to ‘living labor’ (jobs). The way out, in the shorter run, is a social wage combined with shorter hours, and in the longer run, socialism on the path to a classless society. McAfee here sees the problem, if not the full solution. – Carl Davidson

Continue reading →

Fracking and the Shale Gas “Revolution” By Igor Alexeev

Leave a comment

14 August 2013 — Route Magazine and Global Research

Many US shale companies that have been beating the drums of shale “revolution” are now facing oil and gas well depletion. In February 2013 the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) warned that “diminishing returns to scale and the depletion of high productivity sweet spots are expected to eventually slow the rate of growth in tight oil production”. It was a cautious but intriguing statement.

Continue reading →

The European Union and Greece: the Murder of a Nation By Anna FILIMONOVA

Leave a comment

10 August 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

At the end of July, eurozone deputy finance ministers approved another transfer of money to Greece to the tune of EUR 6.8 billion (it had previously been thought that Athens would be allocated EUR 8.1 billion). Several days earlier, meanwhile, the Greek parliament approved the latest in a series of legislative acts, the adoption of which had been a condition of receiving money from international creditors – the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. Continue reading →

The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Culture of Substantive Equality By István Mészáros

Leave a comment

December 2001 — Monthly Review

István MészÁros is author of Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (Monthly Review Press, 2001), and Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press, 1995).

This article is based on a lecture delivered at the Latin American Parliaments’ “Summit on the Social Debt and Latin American Integration,” held in Caracas, Venezuela, July 10-13, 2001.

Continue reading →

China – Avoid the West’s Debt Overhead: A Land Tax is needed to hold down Housing Prices By Michael Hudson

Leave a comment

22 July, 2013 — 

How can China avoid the “Western financial disease” – a real estate bubble followed by defaults and foreclosures? The U.S. and European economies originally sought to avoid this fate by taxing the location’s site value. A rent tax was the focus of Progressive Era reforms.

Continue reading →

Authoritarian Neoliberalism Hits a Wall in Turkey By Özlem Onaran

Leave a comment

6 June 2013 — New Left Project

Özlem Onaran is Professor of Workforce and Economic Development Policy at the University of Greenwich and until 2004 was based at Istanbul Technical University.  She discussed the social, political and economic context to the Gezi Park protests with Anastasia Giamali in an interview for the Greek newspaper AVGI. Continue reading →

The Finance Curse: Introduction By Dan Hind

Leave a comment

4 June 2013 — Dan Hind

It is now well known that many countries which depend on earnings from natural resources like oil have failed to harness them for national development. In many cases it seems even worse than that: for all the hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing into countries like oil-rich Nigeria, for instance, such places seem to suffer more conflict, lower economic growth, greater corruption, higher inequality, less political freedom and often more absolute poverty than their resource-poor peers. This paradox of poverty from plenty has been extensively studied and is known as the Resource Curse.

Continue reading →

Video: Study Debunking Austerity Research Sparks Wide Reaction

Leave a comment

23 April 2013 — The Real News Network

Bob Pollin (Co-Author of Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff): Deficit Hawks still defend conclusions of a study that contained spreadsheet errors and weighted selected countries in an inappropriate way; led to incorrect theory about public debt and growth (Inc. transcript).

Continue reading →

Thatcher’s Record: It’s All Smoke and Mirrors By Tim Holmes

1 Comment

17 April 2013 — New Left Project

If hagiography is the norm after the death of a public figure, Thatcher’s has been no exception. True, it has not gone uncontested: the “folk hatred” of poor and post-industrial Britain has fuelled an unprecedented upsurge of rage among her opponents. At times the media struggled to cope – the Telegraph’s editor shutting its comment threads and objecting that its email address for tributes was “filled with abuse”.  Continue reading →

The actuality of a successful capitalist offensive By Richard Seymour

Leave a comment

29 March 29, 2013 — Lenin’s Tomb

We’ve been waiting five years for a coherent left-wing response to the recession. We’ve been waiting three years for a coherent left-wing response to the cuts. Two years ago, I was asked at a talk how we could communicate the socialist solution to the crisis; I said it would be nice if we had one. It would still be a step forward today. If the extant strategies, groups or alliances were sufficient to deliver this, we would have it by now.

Continue reading →

Reducing production: How should socialists relate to struggles against capitalist growth By Don Fitz

Leave a comment

19 March, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

The question is not should we advocate reducing production within capitalist society but rather: How do we best relate to those struggles that are already occurring? Activists across the globe are challenging the uncontrollable dynamic of economic expansion which threatens the survival of humanity. It has never been more urgent to provide a vision of a new society that can pull these efforts together.

Continue reading →