Stories Capitalists Tell
Articles

Stories Capitalists Tell

Review of Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital (Verso Books, 2015)

Storytelling is important to humans. Storytelling is equally as important to capitalism. In her new book Nicole Ashoff examines the elite in in our society and the stories they tell. She calls them, as the title suggests, “The New Prophets of Capital.”

Many people go to jobs they don’t like and produce things that don’t improve human life. Nicole Aschoff asserts – and I am inclined to agree with her – that this is a strange way to organize society.

Coasting on Borrowed Time: Making Sense of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century
Articles

Coasting on Borrowed Time: Making Sense of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century

By Barry Finger

Review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2014)

French economist Thomas Piketty’s latest book, which first appeared in 2013 and was published in English in 2014, has stimulated a great deal of much-needed debate about the ever-growing level of social inequality in contemporary capitalism. It has certainly encouraged liberals, who seek an alternative to austerity policies that they believe might save capitalism from a profound social crisis. At the same time, it has baffled and irritated Marxists and other heterodox economists of the left, who feel the book misdirects our analysis of the nature of capitalist inequality.

Canadian Capitalism and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples
Articles

Canadian Capitalism and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples

By Todd Gordon

This article from the special Indigenous Resurgence issue of New Socialist magazine in 2006 now rings more true than ever. Seven years later, indigenous struggles against the corporate pillaging and desecration of their traditional territories continue in Canada – at the forefront of these is the battle against the Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker route through the northern British Columbian mainland and coastal islands.

Neoliberal globalization has brought with it the intensification of what Marxist geographer David Harvey refers to as accumulation by dispossession [check out Harvey’s 2009 talk on Youtube – Eds].

Articles

Europe’s Crisis: An Explanation and an Internationalist Alternative

By Özlem Onaran

Europe is now the centre of the global crisis. It is a crisis of the capitalist system, sweeping across Europe and not limited to just one country. The crisis erupted five years ago under governments of both the traditional Left and Right as they all pursued similar neoliberal policies.

Articles

The Continuing Global Slump

By David McNally

This article will be the afterword to the forthcoming Danish translation of the author’s book Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance — NSW.

Articles

Girls, Sex, Markets and Feminism

By Susan Ferguson

This article could begin pretty much anywhere, describing any number of contemporary fads that work to reproduce and reinforce our deeply (hetero)sexist Western norms and behaviours. Girls Gone Wild videos. Toddlers in Tiaras. Playboy bunny-stamped snowboards and cellphone covers. Sex bracelets that signal which sex acts the (inevitably female) wearer is willing to perform. Kiddie-thongs. Thongs.

Articles

No Local

Review of Greg Sharzer, No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World (Zero Books, 2012).

By Valerie Zink

Articles

The International Indigenous Movement for Self-Determination (Part II)

This article is Part 2 of a 2-part series, and is the basis of a presentation at the Historical Materialism 2012 conference in Toronto [http://www.yorku.ca/hmyork/]. Part 1 can be found here. The authors are both based in the United States, and thus use the term “tribal nations” and American Indians (Indigenous peoples in Canada refer to themselves as “First Nations”). – NSW

Articles

The Canadian State Helps Usher in a New Phase of Capital Accumulation

By Zac Saltis

The contents of the federal budget unveiled by the Conservatives on March 29, 2012 are hardly shocking.  In fact, this voluminous document sheds light on what strategies the Canadian state will be adopting to promote and facilitate capital accumulation in this era of economic stagnation and austerity for the working class.

Articles

Economic Crisis and Austerity: The Stranglehold on Canada’s Families

By Adrie Naylor

The claim that economic crises and austerity have an uneven impact on the working class — with the greatest effects being felt by women and children — is one we hear often on the Left. However, with some important exceptions, this claim is all too often just an aside or a footnote.

Articles

Food Prices, Food Crisis and the Absurdity of Market Rationality

By Hamid Sodeifi

Humanity is facing a severe and worsening food crisis. Three billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, are malnourished. Over a billion suffer from “continual and severe hunger” while millions die each year because they lack access to even the most minimal amount of food. Every five seconds a child dies due to hunger or hunger-related diseases.

Articles

A Crucial Book

By Charlie Post

Review of David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011)

X