Tuesday, Mar 16th 2010
It was almost inevitable. Following Kraft’s acquisition of Cadbury, the US food giant has gone back on its guarantee not to close the Cadbury plant in Somerdale with the loss of 400 jobs. According to the BBC, Cadbury employs 4,500 people in the UK. Kraft has yet to announce plans for its Bournville factory in [...]
As Kevin Doogan mentioned in a comment on the ILR post about his article in the New Humanist, he has written about whether or not globalization, technological change, and the new corporate economy has changed the nature of work itself in his book New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work. Using a substantial amount of empirical [...]
The latest Socialist Register, which was published in October 2009, is called Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitialism. As one of the editors, Colin Leys says, the aim was to show that health is a subject that currently isn’t but needs to be considered as part of Political Economy and should be something that is an [...]
Thinking Allowed: An Anthropological Study of Wall St.
Anthropology in an unusual setting: Wall Street. Laurie Taylor talks to the anthropologist who gave up her academic life for over a year to become an investment banker in order to study life on Wall Street. She explains why she immersed herself in the culture of high [...]
It’s 2pm on a Sunday afternoon and I’m standing in the Croppies’ Acre in Dublin. Down the street the SWP are holding a conference in the Ashling hotel where Wittgenstein stayed in ‘48 after he came off the train at Heuston. It’s been raining all day but there’s a break in the weather and the [...]
Jane Slaughtor | Fun with Capitalism
Michael Moore’s new film “Capitalism: A Love Story” premiered to a rowdy—and wholly appreciative—labor audience at the AFL-CIO convention. The event, following a noisy march from the convention center to a theater down the street, was organized by the California Nurses Association and the Labor Campaign for Single Payer among [...]
Origins of Casino Capitalism[1]
When capitalism first began to emerge as the dominant economic system around the turn of the 19th century in Western Europe and North America, the role of the financial sector in the system was simple and straightforward. When individuals or groups wished to set up a new company, they sold shares in [...]
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at…”
Oscar Wilde.
Post-capitalism
The self-destruction of free market economics in the last 6 months has been dramatic. As a complex of fictional financial devices disintegrated the aggressive greed of both local banking systems and global financial markets has been openly exposed. Obscene [...]
There is much in Michael Taft’s ‘Towards a New Economic Narrative‘ that most socialists can agree with. The state must take measures to protect the majority of its population from the ravages of unemployment and recession.
So, yes, we need a new social housing programme, a school building programme, a conservation maintenance programme for older housing, [...]