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Indonesia has got the classic formula for development in poor countries in the world of 21st century imperialism. Its economy is founded on basic commodity production that is highly capital intensive, severely damages the environment and does not provide many good jobs for the people, while the rich pay little tax and public services are limited. And the old Suharto elite remain in control.
What did the WEF Risks Report conclude from its survey of Davos participants? “As we enter 2024, we highlight a predominantly negative outlook for the world over the next two years that is expected to worsen over the next decade. … The outlook is markedly more negative over the 10-year time horizon, with nearly two-thirds of respondents expecting a stormy or turbulent outlook.” Not good for capital and even worse for working people.
Monthly Review | How much does it cost to maintain an empire? A stunning new analysis by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster shows the true scale of U.S. military spending.
Michael Roberts | At the beginning of this year, I wrote a post on how the capitalist mode of production was in what some call a ‘polycrisis’, where various crises: economic (inflation and slump); environmental (climate and pandemic); and geopolitical (war and international divisions) had come together in the early 21st century. Polycrisis, the new buzzword among leftists, is in many ways similar to my own description of the contradictions of the Long Depression of the 2010s that have to come to a head in the 2020s.
The Swiss investment bank expects the country’s oil sector to grow significantly in 2022.
The rebranded “digital bolívar” will wipe out six zeroes from the current “sovereign bolívar” and enter circulation on October 1.
Last week the US Federal Reserve raised its growth forecasts for the US economy for this year and next. Fed officials now reckon the US economy with expand in real terms by 6.5%, the fastest pace since 1984, a few years after the slump of 1980-2. This is a significant rise from the Fed’s previous forecast. Also, the unemployment rate is expected to drop to just 4.5% by year-end, while the inflation rate ticks up to 2.2%, above the official target rate set by the Fed.
It all depends on whether the UK economy can ‘’grow out’’ of its debt burden as it did after the second world war through a combination of high public investment and rising inflation (that eventually forced the devaluation of the pound). Given that the profitability of capital in the UK is at an all-time low and the business investment rate worse than in any other major economy, the prospects of achieving that are small. Before this parliamentary term ends, the UK economy could be facing a new economic crisis.
The move represents a legalisation of the de facto dollarisation seen in recent years.
Spectre‘s Ashley Smith talked to Michael Roberts about his projections for the world economy.
Upon its launch ten years ago, Germany's Industry 4.0 program promised a fourth industrial revolution changing the way we work. Yet for all the talk of novelty, it followed age-old capitalist imperatives: using labor-saving technology not to lessen our workload but subject us to even tighter workplace discipline.
Spectre Journal – The old regime of the Green Revolution is dying, while a new, more baleful, cycle of agrarian capitalism is waiting to be born. In this interregnum, there has emerged a spectacular groundswell of anti-capitalist resistance by farmers and agrarian workers.
Before the pandemic, private equity had amassed $2.5 trillion – more than the GDP of Italy – in 'dry powder,' waiting for distressed assets to plunder. Covid-19 provided them with the perfect opportunity.
The Dirty Fight for Prop 22 and the Gig Economy
In response to the pandemic, politicians in Ottawa set up an emergency wage subsidy scheme that was meant to help workers. But some of Canada’s biggest firms have milked the subsidy scheme for billions while paying out dividends and laying off staff.
During the year of the COVID, global consumer and producer prices dropped fell. In some manufacturing-based economies, there was even a fall in price levels (deflation) eg the Euro area, Japan and China).
In the previous part of this article we saw that the Indian rulers are actively preparing the legal groundwork for parting peasants from their land. In the following part we place this in an international context.
The world economy is witnessing an intensifying drive by international investors to get control of land, including agricultural land, in the Third World. Why is this so?
Over the last two decades, international agencies and the Indian government have explicitly been preparing the ground for transfer of the lands of poor peasants. They term this the creation of “vibrant land sales markets” for farmers who “find their lands too small to be a viable source of livelihood.” In pursuit of this aim, the Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, whereby the State would permanently guarantee the title of the title-holder against any other claimants.
Economic researchers at the Institut de Recherches Économiques et Sociales in France indicate that global commodity chains have three different elements: (1) a production element linking parts and commodities in complex production chains; (2) a value element, which focuses on their role as “value chains,” transferring value between and within firms globally; and (3) a monopoly element, reflecting the fact that such commodity chains are controlled by the centralized financial headquarters of monopolistic multinational corporations and garner massive monopoly rents, as theorized by Stephen Hymer in the 1970s.
Michael Roberts Blog | Mainstream economics cannot deliver even on its own terms because it makes two basic assumptions that are not based on reality; one in so-called ‘microeconomics’ and one in so-called ‘macroeconomics’. As a result, mainstream falls down as a scientific analysis of modern (capitalist) economies.