The dreaded wage-price spiral, the price hikes thought to be the result of wage increases, is the explanation for inflation preferred by bosses. The logic behind the idea is simple: bosses’ rights to profits can never, ever be infringed on.

Anjali Appadurai, democratic socialist leadership candidate for British Columbia’s New Democratic Party, is rattling the party establishment. Her bold left-wing politics have provoked what appears to be a smear campaign by operators within the party itself.

Elena Veduta | Monthly Review | The successes achieved by the USSR thanks to the socialist revolution of 1917—which transformed a backward, agrarian country, rich in raw materials and possessing a huge foreign debt, into an advanced scientific and technological power that determined a bipolar world—are overwhelming. However, after the counter-revolution of 1991, Russia returned to its past. It has again become a raw-material appendage of the world capitalist community and continues to slide downward.

Shock therapy was the term used to describe the drastic switch from a planned publicly owned economy in the Soviet Union in 1990 to a full-blown capitalist mode of production. It was a disaster for living standards for a decade. Shock doctrine was the term used by Naomi Klein to describe the destruction of public services and the welfare state by governments from the 1980s. Now the major central banks are applying their own ‘shock therapy’ to the world economy, intent on driving up interest rates in order to control inflation, despite the growing evidence that this will lead to a global recession next year.