Container vessels at the Yangshan Port, Shanghai, January 2, 2022. Photo courtesy Visual China Group. The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the Group of Seven (the US plus allies) and the total GDP of the BRICS group (China plus allies). Since then, the BRICS economies grew
Continue readingAuthor: Richard D. Wolff
Canadian Dimension: Market fundamentalism is an obstacle to social progress
The Bull of Wall Street in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. Photo by David Hogan/Flickr. A changing world order, a shrinking US empire, migrations and related demographic shifts, and major economic crashes have all enhanced religious fundamentalisms around the world. Beyond religions, other ideological fundamentalisms likewise provide
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The economic realities we face at the end of 2022
Photo by Sascha Grosser/Wikimedia Commons Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers (the United States, China, and the EU) for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. US capitalism and its empire
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: BRICS: the powerful global alliance
The current set of BRICS leaders, from left to right: Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi and Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo courtesy Palácio do Planalto/Flickr. Professor Richard Wolff informs us of the powerful economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) and how the West’s reaction
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: A critique of obscene wealth
The obscenely rich have driven economies and societies further from anything remotely resembling a “level playing field,” writes Richard Wolff. Photo by aisletwentytwo/Flickr. Wherever and whenever obscenely rich people existed, they always protected their wealth and the privileges that come with it from the majority of non-wealthy people working for
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Global capitalism: The challenge of China
According to University of Massachusetts professor Richard Wolff, China’s rise is unmistakable and one of the most important developments in recent economic history. Photo from iStock. In this month’s lecture for Democracy At Work, Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will discuss China’s
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How capitalism’s dogged defenders and propagandists defend it from criticism
Photo by Jorge Salvador/Unsplash The more victims and critics of capitalism coalesce and thereby strengthen one another, the more that economic system is questioned and challenged. That in turn provokes capitalism’s defenders. They increasingly resort to attaching qualifying adjectives to capitalism and deflecting criticisms onto them. They say that the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Can progressives save Biden from disastrous economic policies?
Joe Biden at Royal Missionary Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, April 20, 2020. Photo from Flickr. Since the 1970s, US real wages have largely stagnated. After a century of real wages rising every decade, that stagnation changed the lives of the US working class in traumatic ways. Likewise, since
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why the Neoliberal Agenda Is a Failure at Fighting Coronavirus
A mural celebrating essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair. The utter failure of private capitalism to prepare for the coronavirus should have surprised no one. Private capitalism, as business school graduates repeat, focuses on profit. The “profit incentive,” they learn, makes private capitalism the superior,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism
The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks “to get them through the crisis.” Government treasuries
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: This 4th of July: A letter from Richard D. Wolff
On this 4th of July, when Americans think about the nation’s independence, it is partly under dark clouds. The Trump/GOP regime, desperately trying to “make America great again,” has chosen to make independence aggressive. It has attacked not an old King George representing a dying monarchism, but rising Chinese competitors.
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Capitalism Becomes Questionable
The depth and length of the global crisis are now clear to millions. In the sixth year since it started in late 2007, no end is in sight. Unemployment rates are now less than halfway back from their recession peak to where they were in 2007. Over 20 million are
Continue reading