The immigration issue has split and/or weakened both center and left parties and movements across many nations in recent years.
U.S. and China Why Not a Deal?
An old theme within social theory holds that societies with very unequal distributions of wealth can sustain their social cohesion so long as total wealth is growing.
The Decline of the U.S. Empire: Where Is It Taking Us All?
The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms.
Why Poverty Reduction Under Capitalism Is a Myth
From its beginnings, the capitalist economic system produced both critics and celebrants, those who felt victimized and those who felt blessed.
Capitalism’s Unequal Distribution Deprives You of True Freedom
As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality.
Capitalism, Mass Anger, and 2024 Elections
In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes.
Tariffs Don’t Protect Jobs. Don’t Be Fooled
Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade”
A Professor on “Authorities” Who Order Police to Crush Student Protests
The Washington Post’s journalists recently exposed what many already suspected or knew. Donors from society’s richest 1 percent pressured university administrators and political leaders to use police and other means to crush peaceful student protests.
Empire Decline and Costly Delusions
By Richard D. Wolff When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR defended with […]
Socialism’s Self-Criticism and Real Democracy
Democracy is incompatible with class-divided economic systems. Masters rule in slavery, lords in feudalism, and employers in capitalism. Whatever forms of government (including representative-electoral) coexist with class-divided economic systems, the hard reality is that one class rules the other.