Political economy Archives - Marxist Education Project

From Austerity to Fascism: The Capital Order

In The Capital Order, Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism – in times of social upheaval from below. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, she offers a damning account of the rise of austerity – and of modern economics – at the levers of contemporary political power. Mattei reveals how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across societies.

Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic

Video available: https://youtu.be/FlJYh3VDWNU
William I. Robinson’s new book Global Civil War provides a big-picture account of how the coronavirus pandemic and new digital technologies have drastically transformed capitalism and the entire global economy and society. Analyzing the concentration of power and control in the hands of corporate conglomerates, tech giants, megabanks, and the military-industrial complex, the book documents the extent of unprecedented global inequalities as the mass of humanity faces violent dispossession and uncertain survival. The book issues a dire warning against the emergence of a dystopic digitalized dictatorship but also finds great hope and inspiration in the burgeoning social movements of the poor and the dispossessed as humanity descends into global civil war.

Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore

Video available at https://youtu.be/2nZ9xgNn35A
Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal for radical action against capitalism’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and class exploitation. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”

The Working Class and the Middle Classes: Allies or Foes? with John Milios

A lecture by JOHN MILIOS, Professor of Political Economy at the National Technical University of Athens. The classical political economists defined three social classes on the basis of their forms of income: capitalists (profits), workers (wages), and landowners (rents). Marx, in his critique of political economy, developed a new, non-economistic and non-mechanistic “relational” class theory. On the basis of Marx’s approach, we can tackle complex problems concerning the class structure of contemporary societies and the gray area between the working and middle classes.

Can the Working Class Change the World?

Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of doing that.

Can the Working Class Change the World?

Black Reconstruction

THIS SERIES HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MAY 20!
…the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935), W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states.