The Black Death Killed Feudalism. What Does COVID-19 Mean for Capitalism?
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
Are we now at just such a moment in world history? Will the coronavirus permanently transform the relationship between the state and the market?
Will the Coronavirus Kill Globalization?
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
The global spread of a new pathogen has exposed the fragility of modern life. As it moves around the world, the coronavirus has compromised the circulatory system of globalization, dramatically reducing the international flow of money, goods, and people.
Inside the Battle for Another World
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
With the longstanding liberal-conservative status quo now crumbling, the new right has not only taken up this call, it is putting it into practice. This construction of “another world” — an intolerant, anti-democratic, unsustainable world — can be stopped before it is too late. But it requires that the best of us regain the conviction that Yeats described — not just to counter the new right, but to save the planet from ruin.
A Fairy Tale from 2050: Donald Trump and the Triumph of Anti-Politics
By John Feffer, TomDispatch
I remember the birth of antipolitics. I was a young woman when dissidents in the communist world began to associate official political activity with support for an immoral order. Voting, they believed, was an empty gesture if the ruling party won 99% of the ballots cast.
Splinterlands: The View from 2050
By John Feffer, TomDispatch
Let me start with a confession. I’m old-fashioned and I have an old-fashioned profession. I’m a geo-paleontologist.
Piketty in Elysium
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
Concerns about economic inequality are driving summer blockbusters and New York Times best sellers. When will they start driving our politics?
The next Marx
By John Feffer, Institute for Policy Studies
The financial crisis and the Occupy movement have challenged Left-Right distinctions and prompted calls for an entirely new economic order. The next Marx will produce not a manifesto for the middle class. Rather, the new synthesis will fuse economics and environmentalism in a way that fundamentally reorients both disciplines. Marx pioneered political economy; Marx 2.0 will pioneer planetary economy. It’s not just about greening capitalism, as if enough solar cells and Prii will save the world. Our current economic system has reached its planetary limit.
Con game
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
In both the entrepreneurial and the financial pyramid scams, the magic ingredient is confidence. The investors believe in the financial guru or in the person who initiates them into the marketing chain. And, of course, the investors are confident that they'll make lots of money. In some cases, as in the pyramid schemes that ripped through the former communist world in the 1990s, many investors even knew about the fraud but believed that they could get in and get out with a bag of money before the whole thing collapsed. If the analogy holds, then the U.S. economy is...a giant pyramid scheme?