Category: Analysis
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Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence
By Jason Hickel, from Pearls and Irritations, 23 April 2024 What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation…
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Intellectual Property, tool of colonialism
Text originally published in Portuguese on Feb 27th 2024. The idea that white Europeans could go out and colonize the rest of the world was based on the premise that there was an enlightened humanity that needed to reach the darkened humanity, bringing it into this incredible light. This call to the heart of civilization…
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Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture
Colin Todhunter in Dissident Voice, February 18th, 2024. // In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the…
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Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage
Tricontinental, 23 January 2024 It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism. For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight. In the face…
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World Bank Enables Foreign Aid Theft
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Jan 17 2024 (IPS) – World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources. Aiding elite wealthAid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centres known for banking…
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Neocolonial ISDS, Abused, Biased, Costly, and Grossly Unfair
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Feb 7 2024 (IPS) – Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in international trade and investment agreements – long abused by opportunists with means – are slowly being rejected by cautious governments. Developing country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should urgently withdraw from existing commitments. They…
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Financialization Hypothesis: A Theoretical and Empirical Critique
Turan Subasat, Stavros Mavroudeas. Financialization Hypothesis: A Theoretical and Empirical Critique. World Review of Political Economy 2023 The financialization hypothesis (FH) is a popular leitmotiv which argues that the financial system conquers the commanding heights of the capitalist economy. It maintains that finance gained independence from productive-capital and began to dominate it. The FH bases…
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The IMF and the Argentinian Right
C. P. Chandrasekhar, January 25, 2024 On January 10, the IMF announced its decision to release $4.7 billion out of a $57 billion bailout package sanctioned in 2018 to perennially debt-distressed Argentina, then under a right-wing government headed by Mauricio Macrio. That surprised some. Going by the IMF’s stated ‘principles’, the disbursal should not have…
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The Scourge of Unemployment
Prabhat Patnaik The unemployment situation is worse today than it has ever been in post-independence India. There are two distinct elements that have contributed to this situation. One is the fact that the output recovery from the fall caused by the pandemic-linked lockdown has not been accompanied by a comparable employment recovery. In fact, even…
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Neocolonial ISDS, Abused, Biased, Costly, and Grossly Unfair
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram in Inter Press Service, 7 Feb 2024 Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in international trade and investment agreements – long abused by opportunists with means – are slowly being rejected by cautious governments. Jomo Kwame SundaramDeveloping country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should…
