Many Americans of European ancestry, like me, now see the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere as invasion, conquest, and genocide. Many have grave misgivings about the constitutional settlement that protected trade in slaves, committed government to helping slave catchers, and gave extra votes in Congress to slave owners. The moral perceptions that underlie those […]
Archive | Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)
‘Let Them Eat Pollution’
On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, sent a memorandum to some of his colleagues presenting views on the environment that are doubtless widespread among orthodox economists, reflecting as they do the logic of capital accumulation, but which are seldom offered up for public scrutiny, and then almost never by […]
Capitalism and the Ancient Forest
The battle for the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, which gained widespread national attention with the designation of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in June 1990, can be thought of as a complex set of social and ecological problems traceable to a single cause: the continuing failure on the part […]
The Uncoupling of the World Order
In every discussion of the current global crisis one single fact eclipses all others – the demise of undisputed US hegemony within the world hierarchy of nation states. Despite differing al political persuasions, there seems to be widespread agreement among social scientists that it is only in this context that the chief threats of our […]
The Fetish of Fordism
It may seem strange that Henry Ford, an automobile manufacturer during the early decades of the twentieth century who died in 1947, should suddenly become a major source of contention among those interested in analyzing the contemporary crisis of the U.S. economy. The last few years, however, have seen a vast expansion of the Ford […]
Is Monopoly Capitalism An Illusion?
The theory of capitalism’s monopoly stage has had such a long and distinguished history that one could be excused for thinking of it as an established and non-controversial component of Marxian political economy. Indeed, the “neo-Marxian” theory of secular stagnation which developed out of the analysis of monopoly capital—notably, in the work of Micha Kalecki, […]
