Doorbraak has published a lot of articles on the issue of forced labour for benefit claimants. The emphasis has mainly been on the regime they have to work under. But equally important is the substitution of regular paid work that is the consequence of forced labour. This substitution undermines the entire system of paid labour: why should an employer pay for workers when it is becoming easier all the time ...

It's been 97 years since Lenin first wrote what has since become a "classic" of Marxism: The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, hereafter referred to as SR. I propose to discuss the significance of this work for today (the beginning of the 21st Century) and so will not spend a lot of time discussing its relevance to the world of 97 years ...

1.  In a paper you co-authored nearly twenty years ago with Stephen Resnick for a co-edited book of mine, you highlighted the fact that here was a time when it was thought that societies can follow “one of two mutually exclusive forms. The first form, capitalism, is usually defined in terms of three key components: markets (determining prices and wages), private ownership of the means of production (includi ...

The victory of Kshama Sawant as a Socialist city councillor in Seattle (http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2013/nov/16/socialist-kshama-sawant-wins-seattle-city-council/) has taken an interesting turn on the economics front.  You see, Sawant is not only a socialist, she also has a Ph D in economics and teaches it at the local city college.  This news has outraged a columnist for the Forbes magazine.  Forbes m ...

The death of Nelson Mandela reminds us of the great victory that the black masses of South Africa achieved over the vicious, cruel and regressive apartheid system first encouraged by British imperialism and then adopted by a reactionary and racist white South African ruling class to preserve the privileges of a tiny few.  Mandela spent 27 years in prison and the people he represented fought a long and hard ...

C.J. Polychroniou and Anastasia Giamali: Neoliberal ideology claims that the government is a problem, society does not exist and individuals are responsible for their own fate. Yet, big business and the rich rely, as ever, on state intervention to maintain their hold over the economy and to enjoy a bigger slice of the economic pie. Is neoliberalism a myth, merely an ideological construct? Noam Chomsky: The ...

The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists. ...

Worried by the current crisis affecting the Eurozone and many other parts of the world, we also sometimes feel disempowered by our lack of deeper understanding of the mechanisms that have triggered such devastating developments. Some time back, Allegra started to explore the financial world (here),  the current transformations of Universities (here and here) as well as the power and failures of bureaucracie ...

I have just attended the 10th annual Historical Materialism conference in London where I presented a paper (among hundreds of others) and heard the contributions of many others.  But more on that in my next post. ...

Germany, US and UK among the biggest tax heavens in the world. UK: New index reveals UK runs biggest part of global secrecy network This new edition of the Financial Secrecy Index shows that the United Kingdom is the most important global player in the financial secrecy world. While the UK itself ranks only in 21st place, it supports and partly controls a web of secrecy jurisdictions around the world, from ...