Topic: Labor / Economics

  In the Che Guevara Commune5 in the foothills of the Andes, a long-standing coffee cooperative, built years earlier through the hard work of seasoned cadres who are mostly from Colombia, opted to formally become a commune after Chávez’s 2009 declaration. In El Panal Commune in Caracas, a highly combative revolutionary organization spurred the formation of…

EVs are a gift to the industrial capitalists who run Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis: they keep the assembly lines rolling and the revenues flowing. With consumers holding on to their cars longer and longer, a new market segment is necessary to stimulate sales. EVs also make private vehicle ownership palatable to a segment of…

Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky sent a love letter to US companies, thanking “such giants of the international financial and investment world as BlackRock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs” for buying up his country’s assets.  “Everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine”, he enticed, claiming that the reconstruction of his nation “will…

In the 19th century we produced things that were used and needed, use values. Now under monopoly capitalism, it is a demand-constrained system, because corporations have so much productive capacity, they can’t utilize it, particularly at the prices they set, because they set high monopoly prices. So, there’s always an underutilization of productive capacity. Twenty-five…

One of the most compelling aspects of Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution, founded with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999, is the central role that communes play in the process. These communes bring together communal councils, elected representatives of 200-400 families in urban areas (and 20-50 families in rural areas), to manage social services and…

Externally imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs), after the early 1980s’ sovereign debt crises, have forced African economies to be even more open – at great economic cost. SAPs have made them more (food ) import-dependent while increasing their vulnerability to commodity price shocks and global liquidity flows .  Leonce Ndikumana and his colleagues estimate over…

Policies favourable to fossil fuel companies have extracted our common wealth – our air, forests, land… – and put it in the hands of a small minority. Green policies are therefore bound to be redistributive at a time when inequality is soaring. One of the measures proposed to reduce the regressivity of carbon prices is…

  Socialist economic planning is the only way to ensure a just transition to low-carbon energy and sustainable production. Left to the market, any move to green alternatives will never be rapid enough, since fossil fuels remain so highly profitable; the manufacture of renewable technologies will be scarred by brutally exploitative, destructive, and profit-driven practices;…