Topic: Labor / Economics

It’s not just reliance on fossil fuels that imperils the planet, but capitalism’s chronic pursuit of economic growth. Unlimited growth means more demand for energy. And more energy demand makes it more difficult to develop sufficient capacity for generating renewable energy in the short time left to avert catastrophic warming.  Marx predicted the development of…

Little more than a century ago, Bitish and Indian archaeologists began excavating the remains of what they soon realized was a previously unknown civilization in the Indus Valley. Straddling parts of Pakistan and India and reaching into Afghanistan, the culture these explorers unearthed had existed at the same time as those of ancient Egypt and…

You might think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre. Yet I knew nothing of it.It happened in May, 1937,…

It is instructive to compare the role of trade unions in Kenya’s War of Independence under Mau Mau with the situation under Maji Maji, the Tanzanian people’s war of liberation (1904-1907). Whereas there was little working class involvement in Tanzania, Mau Mau was influenced in its ideological outlook as well as the strategies by the…

I found a 1992 Deutsche Bank study arguing that, of all the countries into which the USSR had just been divided, it was Ukraine that had the best prospects for success.  Ukraine had been one of the most industrially developed parts of the Soviet Union. It was among the key centres of Soviet metallurgy, of…

In 2011, workers at the Vio.Me factory in Thessaloniki, Greece, stopped receiving wages. Management and owners abandoned the facility shortly afterward. Instead of dispersing, the workers of Vio.Me held an assembly and voted to take over management of the factory themselves. Over the past decade, they’ve kept the factory running, jointly determining production decisions through…

Broadly, leftist climate programs represent two divergent tendencies. One advances a productivist approach, aiming to institute a socialist economy that would prioritize sustainability while raising standards of living. The other takes a conservationist approach, arguing for democratically scaling back collective consumption—and thus production—to accord with planetary constraints. The tension between these tendencies represents a real…

Correa’s real crimes, in the eyes of Ecuador’s elite, are breaking with both neoliberalism and Ecuador’s traditional subservience to Washington… He dramatically increased financial regulation and tax collection… Under Correa’s leadership, poverty fell by almost half.  By 2015, the efficiency of Ecuador’s public services, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, improved dramatically compared to other…