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Written by Fred Weston
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Friday, 02 July 2010 |
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There has been much focus on the assaults on civil liberties in Toronto during the G20 summit. However, the summit was also a failure within the fences. The recent G20 summit in Toronto brought
to the surface all the contradictions of global capitalism. Every
capitalist nation wants to climb out of the crisis at the expense of its
competitors. Everyone is calling for demand to be kept up, while at the
same time applying cuts in public spending at home. At the heart of
this are the mountains of debt that have accumulated everywhere.
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Written by Yuri Yarin
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Tuesday, 29 September 2009 |
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In early September, Greyhound Canada announced a plan to cut its bus services in Manitoba and north-western Ontario, unless the federal government subsidized them with an additional $15 million. Greyhound Canada already receives subsidies from the government on the condition that it services the less profitable routes. But now, the company is claiming that it is not making enough profits from running these routes. Greyhound claims that it has been hit by the crisis and needs a “bail-out.” |
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Written by Mike Palecek
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Tuesday, 11 August 2009 |
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We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. We are told that competition, combined with the profit motive, pushes science to new frontiers and gives big corporations incentive to invent new medicines, drugs, and treatments. The free market, we are told, is the greatest motivator for human advance. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Patents, profits, and private ownership of the means of production are actually the greatest fetters science has known in recent history. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception. |
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Written by Mike Palecek
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Saturday, 25 July 2009 |
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New numbers about personal debt loads have come out and they point towards an impending economic catastrophe in Canada. Many politicians and economists eagerly tell the public that Canada has come through the worst of the recession and the economy will be rebounding very soon. But, the numbers tell a different story. Canada, so far, has been hit hard by the fallout of the global recession with exports of manufactured goods plummeting, but until this point the domestic markets have remained strong. This is about to change. |
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Written by Joel Bergman
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Tuesday, 06 January 2009 |
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The crisis in the auto industry is now affecting nearly every country. Demand for vehicles has fallen sharply all over the globe, with sales reaching lows not seen for three decades. If the main auto manufacturing companies go under, there will be millions of jobs lost and a massive blow to the rest of the economy, which would have a disastrous effect on the living conditions of millions of workers around the globe. Ordinary people all around the world are seriously questioning what is going on. What is happening? How can we save our jobs and our communities? |
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Written by In Defence of Marxism Editorial Board
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Friday, 19 December 2008 |
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The crisis of world capitalism is unfolding relentlessly and with gathering speed. First came the financial crisis (the so-called credit crunch), but now the second phase has begun - the crisis of the real economy - and it is accelerating as each day goes by. This is leading to sharp changes in consciousness, rising working class militancy and the beginnings of polarisation within the labour movement itself. |
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Written by Camilo Cahis
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Friday, 24 October 2008 |
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As we predicted, the global economic crisis has hit Canada. For months, finance ministers and bankers have tried to reassure Canadians that the housing bubble, the credit crisis, and sub-prime mortgages were all foreign problems that could not apply to Canada. Every day they are being proved wrong. Working class leaders need to be calling for the nationalization of industry and the banks under workers’ control as the only solution to the financial mess. |
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Written by Rob Sewell
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Wednesday, 08 October 2008 |
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In the words of Alan Greenspan, “The crisis will mean a return to the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. Many of us thought that struggle was over with the collapse of the command economies, but this is not the case.” Reality is indeed coming home with a bang! |
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Written by Alan Woods
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Monday, 29 September 2008 |
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We live in exceptional times. The financial panic in the USA is creating waves that are threatening to engulf the whole world. This is rapidly transforming the consciousness of millions. Alan Woods looks at how the world economy reached the stage it has, where it is on the brink of a serious downward, so serious that it could be as worse if not worse than 1929. |
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Written by Adam Fulsom
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Tuesday, 16 October 2007 |
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The Canadian dollar is now on par with the American dollar for the first time in over 30 years. Judging from the media, it would seem like every Canadian has somehow magically become richer overnight and it is now time to do some big spending. But before you start throwing around your strong Canadian currency, take some time to ponder about how the strengthening of the dollar is really affecting things. |
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Written by Adam Fulsom
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Wednesday, 11 July 2007 |
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The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently released a study showing irrefutably that real wages for Canadian workers, which take inflation into account, have been frozen since the late 1970's. However, over that same time the economy has grown by 72% and Canadian workers have been working harder and smarter and have managed to raise productivity by 51%. These statistics show that the harder Canadian workers work, the less they get, just as Marx predicted. |
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Written by Miriam in Vancouver
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Monday, 12 February 2007 |
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Far from being a “gay man’s” disease, HIV/AIDS now infects 40 million people around the world, 45% of them women and 6% children. The list of regions and populations most affected by AIDS reads like a list of the poorest and most disadvantaged populations. How will we do away with HIV and AIDS? This is not an easy question, and there are no easy answers. These days, the pharmaceuticals are far more interested in treating profitable “diseases”. |
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Written by Mick Brooks -- www.marxist.com
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Monday, 21 August 2006 |
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Global warming – the ‘population time bomb’ – nuclear energy – pollution – environmental issues are always in the news. There is even a party – the Green Party – that claims to put the environment at the centre of its concerns. The Green Party claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions. |
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Written by Harry Nielson -- www.marxist.com
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Wednesday, 09 August 2006 |
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An astonishing article appeared in the Financial Times on Saturday 29th July. Written by Philip Coggan, a senior staff writer on the newspaper, it opened with brutal honesty by saying "it has been a great time to be a capitalist. All around the world, profits have been rising as a percentage of GDP". The author goes on to give examples showing how in Europe, the United States, and also now in Japan, profits are at record levels. |
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Written by Michael Roberts -- www.marxist.com
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Thursday, 25 May 2006 |
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Capitalism cannot provide a decent living to everyone, but as long as it guarantees significant layers of the population a reasonable standard of living it can maintain a degree of social stability. Recent figures on the situation in the USA show that “middle America” is beginning to feel the pinch, a phenomenon which indicates that social turmoil will soon be on the agenda. |
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Written by Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 13 April 2006 |
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It is fashionable these days for bourgeois economists and sociologists to refute the dialectical materialist method of analysis developed by Karl Marx. One of the basic ideas of Karl Marx that is constantly being denied by the bourgeois is his theory of value. This is understandable because from this very theory flow all the other conclusions of Marx, in particular that of the need to overthrow capitalism if we are to put an end to all the contradictions of this unjust system which condemns millions of human beings to abject poverty, mass unemployment, periodic economic crises and wars. In this article (divided into two parts) Mick Brooks, using up to date facts and figures, shows how the Marxist Labour Theory of Value is still valid today. (by Mick Brooks) |
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Written by Michelle Fabbri
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Friday, 20 January 2006 |
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Since the era of Deng Xiaoping China has been moving ever closer to capitalism. What started as an attempt to use market criteria to push forward economic growth within the context of an economy still dominated by the public sector, took on a momentum of its own. Now we have capitalist relations dominating. (by Michelle Fabbri) |
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Written by Lorenzo Fiorito
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Saturday, 01 October 2005 |
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Wherever you go in the world, the one inevitable topic of workplace conversation is how little money is made by the workers, compared to how much the boss makes for the privilege of telling you what to do. Far from being an idle complaint, it is exactly this imbalance which is the key to understanding how our society works. This understanding - plain to every worker - is in fact, the beginning point of Marx's analysis of capitalist society: what he called the theory of surplus value. (by Lorenzo Fiorito) |
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Written by Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 05 May 2005 |
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In the 1980s there was a debate within the Marxist tendency about productive and unproductive labour. Here we provide a contribution to that debate by Mick Brooks. Although this is archive material, we believe it will help today’s generation to better understand capitalism in order to overthrow it. (by Mick Brooks) |
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Written by Mick Brooks
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Tuesday, 01 April 2003 |
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In reviewing Robert Brenner's theories, Mick Brooks looks at the causes of capitalist crisis and delves into such questions as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and overproduction. This article is to be considered as a contribution to the debate among Marxists on the causes of capitalist crisis. (By Mick Brooks) |
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Written by Alan Woods
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Tuesday, 14 November 2000 |
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In the recent period the theories of Kondratiev have enjoyed new popularity with bourgeois economists and some people who consider themselves Marxists. It is one of those ironies of which history is so rich that Kondratiev's ideas are being used by bourgeois economists to justify the idea that the capitalist system can go on indefinitely in a never-ending series of "long waves" in which long periods of downswing are automatically followed by long periods of upswing and vice versa. It is rather like an economic version of the "perpetual motion machine" which people have endeavoured to discover for centuries, but which so far has not been found anywhere under the sun. (by Alan Woods) |
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