Germany – The Genocidal State!

In an online seminar on 5 March 2026, the Palestinian academic Abdaljawad Omar reflected on several universal insights, which have come to light as a result of the ongoing Genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. His second universal insight focused on a truth, which has always been there, but has only now come to light for everybody to see. Israel's brutality against the Palestinian people has, of course, always been there at least since the Nakba in 1948. It is now that it is openly permitted to act like a monster, attacking indiscriminately schools, hospitals, universities and locations of worship. However, it is not only permitted by the international order to carry out these heinous acts considered by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to constitute genocide. Israel is actually supported by Western countries. The liberal order committed to universal human rights has always only been partial. What many observers always knew can no longer be denied. While the liberal order pretends, the authoritarian order underneath the liberal mask does not. In view of the ongoing genocide, pretending is no longer possible. The mask has been removed and while the language remains the same, is still the language of the mask, everybody can now see through it. What does this imply for Germany and its continuing support of Israel?

 

Divisions in the Core of Global Capitalism? Italian Labour and ‘Free Trade’

The global labour movement has been divided over ‘free trade’. Many unions in the Global North, especially in export-oriented sectors, supported such agreements to secure markets and jobs, while unions in the Global South opposed them having experienced job losses and deindustrialisation. In my new article, ‘Divisions in the Core of Global Capitalism? Italian Labour and “Free Trade”’, published in the journal New Political Economy, I demonstrate that a split has opened up in the core of global capitalism. Against the background of drastic deindustrialisation, Italian trade unions have moved to an explicit anti – ‘free trade’ position, while especially the export sector German and Scandinavian trade unions continue their support. 

 

Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis

Over the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has faced a series of intertwined crises, including the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the EU and the IMF on several member states; the increase of flows of refugees triggered by war and famines and the humanitarian disaster caused by Fortress Europe; Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism. In turn, new crises have emerged and further intensified the previous ones: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the impending climate catastrophe. To capture the multiple, interrelated, and self-reinforcing characters of the crises affecting global capitalism and European integration, the term ‘polycrisis’ – originally coined by the French complex theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – has become increasingly popular, both among scholars and European elites alike (Tooze, 2022). As we argue in our recently published co-edited volume, Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis (Edward Elgar, 2025), Critical Political Economy (CPE) is well placed to contribute to this debate. In this blog post, we will outline the purpose underpinning this volume and present some of the key findings.

Social and Environmental Upgrading through Global Value Chains? A review of the book by Selwyn and Bernhold.

In Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold provide a powerful critique of the mainstream global value chain (GVC) literature in its various versions. In particular, they criticise their emphasis on the possibilities of social and environmental upgrading through an expansion of GVCs. Instead, they convincingly argue that capitalist value chains (CVCs) intensify the exploitation of workers and the environment alike.  In this review, I will highlight some key contributions of the volume while raising a couple of conceptual and empirical concerns.

 

Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry

Polycrisis has become a widely used concept. Politicians, public intellectuals and academics alike are drawing on it when describing our current global situation. In my article ‘Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry’, recently published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, I explore how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises, which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises on the other. In this blog post, I summarise the main conceptual and empirical findings of the article.

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism: Review of William I. Robinson’s latest book.

In his latest book Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (CUP, 2025), William I. Robinson provides a masterful analysis of the current crisis engulfing global capitalism. Robinson is clearly one of the best contemporary Marxist thinkers when it comes to investigating the current dynamics tearing capitalism apart. In this blog post, I will highlight some of his major contributions while also point to some of the blind spots in his analysis.

 

EU Court Upholds Minimum Wage Directive in Victory for Social Europe

‘The Court of Justice of the European Union has delivered a landmark verdict on the EU Minimum Wage Directive that I would characterise as “Social Europe 2, Liberal Europe 1”.’ In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that this ruling represents another example of an unintended yet politically motivated “spillover” of policymaking powers to the EU level—one that ironically stems from employers’ own strategic miscalculations during the financial crisis.