Vulture Capitalism: Going beyond Keynesianism and Neo-liberalism!

Tired about reading more post- or neo-Keynesian literature on how the state may be able to step in and solve neo-liberal capitalism’s crisis tendencies? Then Grace Blakeley’s latest book on Vulture Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the volume to turn to. 

Engagingly written around a host of stories such as the history of Fordlandia, a factory town in the Amazon rainforest intended to secure rubber for car manufacturing, or the scandals around Boeing and its faulty 737 Max causing hundreds of deaths in two aeroplane crashes, this book provides illuminating insights about what is wrong with capitalism and how we can get beyond it.

Atonement for the Holocaust through support of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Germany quo vadis?

The Holocaust has weighed heavily on Germany and the German population. Taught widely across almost all years in school, there is a clear sense that Germany today must take responsibility for its past and act accordingly to redeem itself. Nevertheless, while the German government and many of my fellow German citizens believe that this implies unquestioning support for the state of Israel, I will argue in this post that the main focus has to be on opposing Genocide wherever it occurs.

 

The New Age of Catastrophe: Reviewing Alex Callinicos’ latest book.

With The New Age of Catastrophe (Polity Press, 2023) Alex Callinicos has published another impressive book of great historical and thematic breadth and depth. In this blog post, I will briefly review this volume, outline its merits but also identify a couple of especially conceptual shortcomings.

Kai Wiedenhöfer, 3. März 1966 - 9. Januar 2024!

Fotografie war Kais Leben. Es begann damit, dass er die Portraits aller Schülerinnen und Schüler für die Abschlusszeitung unseres Abiturjahrganges 1986 am Ludwig-Uhland Gymnasium in Kirchheim unter Teck aufnahm. Ab da gab es kein Zurück mehr.

Contesting Musk: Swedish Tesla strike becomes a global conflict

What began as a local strike by 130 mechanics for a collective labour agreement (CLA) in the Swedish Tesla service workshops is escalating into a global conflict, argues Roland Erne in this guest post. According to the Swedish arbitrator for labour disputes, Tesla boss Elon Musk forbade his local managers to make any concessions to the trade unions, even though CLAs have been a central component in Swedish labour relations for decades. Clearly, Elon Musk feels infinitely powerful and thinks he can bring even Europe's strongest labour unions to their knees. 

Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value: a review of the book by Carchedi and Roberts.

Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts are seasoned commentators on the changing fortunes of capitalism. In their latest, joint book Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value (Pluto Press, 2023), they bring these insights together and assess them through Marx’s theory of value and here especially the tendency of the falling rate of profit. In this blog post, I will discuss their main contributions as well as provide some critical reflections. 

Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century?

Against a back-ground of global economic crisis and heightened geo-political confron-tations, the inter-national labour movement has remained as important as ever for the defence of working people and wider society. And yet international organised labour is also in crisis. In my article ‘Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21^st century’, published in the journal International Union Rights, I argue that we need to go beyond a narrow focus on trade unions as the privileged agent of workers’ interests and understand ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ more broadly for successful resistance against capitalist exploitation.