NM's blog

China’s spectacular economic development has brought up the price of its labour and undermined Western corporate profits .

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.  —  Lenin  referring to an earlier statement by Marx. “[I]t was the combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and Washington’s aggressive drive for a unipolar order that led to much more open denials of imperialism on the left. Ironically, at a time when liberals were celebrating a new naked imperialism, much of the global left jettisoned all critical notions of imperialism theory, even, in some cases, offering support for the new empire ideology.  Here the ideological hegemony exerted by capital over the Western left was on full display. [with its derivatives and distractions: identity politics, ‘democracy promotion’, ‘the threat of Islam’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, expansion of NATO, ‘it’s in their culture’, ‘saving Muslim women’, ‘we are all middle class now’, ‘human rights’, liberal feminism, celebrity culture …] “[T]he gap between the views of imperialism...

From 2021 Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

According to Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi,  imperialism is “a persistent and long-term net appropriation of surplus value by the high-technology imperialist countries from the low-technology dominated countries.” there are “four channels through which surplus value flows to the imperialist countries: currency seigniorage; income flows from capital investments; unequal exchange through trade; and changes in exchange rates.” “modern imperialism does not deny the persistent existence of colonialism. Colonialism and modern imperialism do not exclude each other… Colonialism contains in itself the germs of modern imperialism.” “the trade of the commodities with high technological content produced in the imperialist countries for the capitalistically produced raw materials or industrial goods produced with lower technological content in the dominated countries” results in “unequal exchange.” “under modern imperialism, technology has become the new battlefield.” “military and ide...

Is the world poor, or unjust?

I am at the end of this book. I recommend it. You just need some updated figures while you are reading. The Globalisation of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism Two major factors cause capitalist crisis: declining profitability and overproduction. I am not convinced that the latter is a major factor. The problem is not that capitalism produces too much, but that what it is produced is not provided to the global population. Half of the world population is unable to buy what is produced or buys too little of what is produced because it is too poor. That means that lack of investment in large swathes of the world–Latin America and South Africa, Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia–unemployment, precarity, etc. deprives half of the world from getting access to what is produced. Those who produce get little or almost nothing from what they produce.  According to the WHO “around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. ...

  The Marginalised Redefine the Political