"Clearly, something is sabotaging society’s rational development. We should have those trains, and some big solar-powered apartment buildings near the stations. Even if I think the solutions are probably closer to agroecology than indoor vertical farming and giant sailboats than green jetliners, that doesn’t stop me from agreeing with the Abundance authors that there’s a block. But where Klein and Thompson blame self-seeking “groups” who—according to the work of economist Mancur Olson—are a constant and unavoidable threat to human collective action, Marxists understand capitalist production as riven by particular ironies and contradictions.

For example: capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter, for fear competition will drive out the profit. The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density: the more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge. But the same supply mechanism that pushes down prices discourages capital from the sector."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris

#Abundance #Liberalism #Capitalism #PoliticalEconomy #Degrowth

Canada is back in fashion:

"Canada is the second-largest country by land mass, with the world’s longest coastline. It is bookended by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, making it ideally situated for global trade.

Marko Papic, chief strategist at BCA Research, also reckons Canada could be better off in a warmer world. “Global warming could increase agricultural yields, open up large swaths of the country to mineral exploration, and allow for new trade routes through the Arctic,” he said.

The country is energy independent, with the world’s largest deposits of high-grade uranium and the third-largest proven oil reserves. It is also the fifth-largest producer of natural gas.

Canada boasts a huge supply of other commodities too, including the largest potash reserves (used to make fertiliser), over one-third of the world’s certified forests and a fifth of the planet’s surface freshwater. Plus, it has an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium and other rare earth elements, which are used in renewable technologies.

“Canada absolutely has potential to be a global superpower,” added Papic. But the nation has lacked the visionary leadership and policy framework to capitalise on its advantages.

US President Donald Trump’s tariff threat has, however, shifted the Overton window. There is now a growing political consensus to unlock Canada’s economic potential and reduce its dependence on exports to its southern neighbour. That task will fall to either Prime Minister Mark Carney or opposition leader Pierre Poilievre following an election this year.

Canada’s GDP has long trailed its G7 peers, ranking 16th globally in purchasing power parity terms. A country with its geography could clearly generate higher output. To do so, the Canadian economy needs to become more efficient, raise investment and attract more high-skilled workers. Here’s how."

https://www.ft.com/content/d4813838-66b2-4823-8361-11d467142fd2

#Canada #USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #Geopolitics

"Now as China is forming new global supply chains, it’s building on existing ones established by Japan and South Korea as well as the West. Chinese EV makers can build on Toyota and Nissan’s supply chain in Thailand. Chinese electronics companies can build on Samsung’s manufacturing base in Vietnam.

And, like Japan before it, China is using these economic linkages to support its own national interests while framing them as mutually beneficial partnerships. China is not the only country that loves using the phrase “win-win” when describing international partnerships. Shinzo Abe used it frequently when talking about Japan’s relationship with the US, EU, Russia, Asia, and of course China. For decades, Japan claimed credit for using aid and investment to help its Asian neighbors develop economically while turning the region into Japan’s manufacturing backyard. Throughout this whole process, Japan was careful to maintain control over core technology and prevent technology “leakage” to other countries. Now China is doing many of the same things with a similar framing.

But there is one important difference. China appears willing to leverage its control over technology, machinery, and critical inputs to actively undermine the industrial development of other countries—India being the prime example. In a not-so-ironic twist, China’s approach looks more like that of another great power, namely US efforts to cut out China."

https://www.high-capacity.com/p/china-is-trying-to-reshape-global

#China #PoliticalEconomy #Imperialism #Manufacturing #SupplyChains

"Techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency quickly results in a state of alienation that may not be appealing to either side of the political spectrum. If Japan is any example, the collaboration between technocrats and right-wing politicians is unlikely to last forever. In 1940, the Japanese Prime Minister announced the New Order movement, which sought to overhaul the government’s structure to create a single-party state with absolute power. Mimura, the historian, said, “It reminds you a little bit of now: everything needs to be fixed, all at once. It is a little eerie to draw that historical comparison: this is the New Order in America.” Yet the power of Japan’s technocrats began to wane. When the country started faring poorly in the war, the military pushed to continue the campaign past the point that technocrats considered feasible. Kishi, the architect of technocratic Manchuria, left the government in 1944. Still, as Mimura explained, the bureaucrats had no political constituency or party to hold them accountable for their techno-fascistic program. When the U.S. sought to rebuild Japan, in part as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the region, Kishi and his colleagues were the ones who set about industrializing the nation once more. Their status as unelected officials meant, ironically, that they could stage a return to politics without “any blood on their hands,” Mimura said. In 1955, Kishi helped establish a new political party, and a few years later he became Prime Minister."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk

#TechnoFascism #USA #BigTech #SiliconValley #Japan #PoliticalEconomy

"This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation.

Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man."

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterplan/

#USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #Protectionism

"#AdamHanieh discusses the displacement of #Palestinians, the prevalence of the #OilIndustry, and how capitalism operates in the #GulfStates...

https://youtu.be/M09HA9CdmJ0

"His new book, #CrudeCapitalism: #Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market is out now with #VersoBooks: https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/2760-crude-capitalism?utm_campaign=crude_capitalism_25&utm_medium=social&utm_source=youtube "

#Palestine #MiddleEast #MiddleEastPolitics #imperialism #PoliticalEconomy #petropolitics #geopolitics #ArabPolitics #PoliticalTheory #ArabMarxism #books @palestine @bookstodon

"China’s government bond market has opened 2025 with a clear warning for policymakers: without more determined stimulus, investors expect deflationary pressures to become even more entrenched in the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s 10-year bond yield, a benchmark for economic growth and inflation expectations, fell to a record low of less than 1.6 per cent during trading last week and has since hovered close to that level.

Crucially, the whole yield curve has shifted downwards rather than steepening, suggesting investors are alarmed about the long-term outlook and not just anticipating short-term cuts to interest rates.

“For the long-term [bonds], yields have been trending down and I think that’s more about longer-term growth expectations and inflation expectations becoming more pessimistic. And I think that trend is likely to continue,” said Hui Shan, chief China economist at Goldman Sachs."

https://www.ft.com/content/6fe07039-eb7d-47d9-8e97-e933bab0085a

#China #Economy #Deflation #PoliticalEconomy

"There is a fourth, more realistic conception of tariffs that has been effective in some key instances. Advocates of this perspective view tariffs as a shield behind which other, mainly domestic policies can work more effectively. Traditionally, trade laws have allowed countries to use tariffs to protect vulnerable sectors or regions under specific conditions, effectively supplementing domestic social policy.

An even more significant example is infant-industry protection, which has worked best when it exists alongside other instruments to incentivize domestic firms to innovate and upgrade. Some notable cases include the late-nineteenth-century United States, post-1960s South Korea and Taiwan, and post-1990s China. In each of these cases, industrial policies went far beyond trade protection, and it is unlikely that tariff barriers on their own would have produced the gains each of these economies experienced.

Similarly, green policies often require some trade barriers to make them economically and politically viable, as in the case of the European Union’s carbon tariffs and the local-content requirements of the US Inflation Reduction Act. In all these cases, tariffs play a supporting role for other policies that serve a broader purpose, and can be a small price to pay for the larger benefit.

Unfortunately, Trump has not offered a domestic agenda of renewal and economic reconstruction in any of these areas, and his tariffs will likely stand – and fail – on their own."

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-has-wrong-concept-of-tariffs-by-dani-rodrik-2025-01

#USA #Trump #Protectionism #TradeWars #Tariffs #PoliticalEconomy

"In 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sum­marised a number of studies that estimated the costs of geoeco­nomic fragmentation (GEF). These ranged from 0.9 per cent of global GDP under mild assumptions to as high as 8.5 per cent of global GDP under severe assumptions. There are no exact estimates to be had. These estimates should be contrasted with its biannual global economic forecast, the World Economic Outlook (WEO). The latest edition, of October 2024, penned global growth in 2025 at 3.2 per cent, unchanged from the 2024 estimate and a sliver less than the 3.3 per cent estimate in 2023. With latest economic data from the UK showing no growth and Germany faring equally badly, it is not surprising that global economic output has stagnated. Even if one were to filter out cyclical factors behind such fluctuations in output, the geoeconomic factors loom large in this story. In Britain’s case, growth has nosedived ever since Brexit and Germany’s economic travails are largely due to exorbitant costs of en­ergy. The later phase of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder was as much about sound economic management as it was about cheap energy, most of it from Russia. Once those taps shut, the German economy caught a chill.

Among the bright spots in this bleak scenario are China and India with estimated growth rates of 4.5 per cent and 6.5 per cent respectively in 2025. There are other economies with faster growth but they do not matter for global output as their share of output in the world economy is very small."

https://openthemagazine.com/cover-stories/a-fragmenting-world/

#Globalization #Protectionism #TradeWars #PoliticalEconomy #GeoEconomicFragmentation

"‘Liberal’ and ‘capitalist’ paired as a hyphenated compound word seems like an oxymoron, leaving one to wonder, what do civil liberties and democracy have to do with an economic system that often infringes on the aforementioned liberal defining characteristics? Well, A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms by Giampaolo Conte analyzes the historical scope of capitalist reforms, particularly through the British economy, under the guise of liberalism from the nineteenth century and beyond. In just four chapters, while grazing the philosophy of Marxism through figures like Antonio Gramsci, Conte offers a clarifying historical perspective on the evolution of capitalist reforms. Conte’s engagement in this historical project reignites a conversation on the ability of capitalism, a system that thrives on exploitation and violence, to textually morph into an ostensibly paradoxical philosophy, that is, liberalism, to gain submission (domestically and internationally), expand dominance and accumulate capital. A History of Capitalist Transformation displays how domestic social classes and semi-peripheral states (developing nations) have both fallen prey to the expansion of internal and external capitalist reforms. According to Conte, the action of falling prey is caused by the presentation of liberal-capitalist reforms as they are presented through the cultural, moral and civic values of liberalism and not the violent and individualist values of capitalism (38)."

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21887_history-of-capitalist-transformation-a-critique-of-liberal-capitalist-reforms-by-giampaolo-conte-reviewed-by-julia-bradley/

#Capitalism #Liberalism #EconomicHistory #Reformism #PoliticalEconomy

SPOT ON!!! You really to have to understand political economy, monetary economics, and economic history to tackle the current historical macro-scenario -

👉 "The next question is whether the protectionist policies espoused by Mr. Trump can save the people who are asking for his help. Unfortunately, the trade wars of the 1930s suggest the answer is probably “No.”

In the 1930s, the global economy was thrown into turmoil by the sharp increases in US import duties implemented in 1930 under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the retaliatory tariffs by other nations that followed. The value of global trade plunged 66% from the peak, and economies around the world suffered heavily.

The resulting economic turmoil eventually led to World War II. The US, which got through the greatest tragedy in human history by mobilizing its military capabilities, decided the world must never repeat this mistake. To that end, it introduced the system of free trade symbolized by the 1947 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).

This US-led free trade system produced unprecedented prosperity for humanity, but cracks began to appear when the nature of the currency market changed after the developed nations began liberalizing capital flows in 1980.

Today, just as in the 1930s, free trade is facing a potential crisis in the form of a sharp increase in US tariffs. If the authorities seriously wish to avoid this outcome, I think the nations of the world must come together and carry out an exchange rate adjustment similar to the Plaza Accord." 👈

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/trump-tariffs-and-exchange-rates-the-message-of-elections-in-the-us-and-japan

#USA #Trump #Protectionism #FreeTrade #USTariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #MonetaryPolicy #EconomicHistory
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/trump-tariffs-and-exchange-rates-the-message-of-elections-in-the-us-and-japan

Two of the best works ever in the critique of political philosophy and the critique of political economy, respectively - #Marx #Capital #SheldonWolin #PoliticalEconomy #CriticalTheory #PoliticalTheory #PoliticalPhilosophy