In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80% of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes. Of […]

The post Capitalism, mass anger and 2024 elections appeared first on Asia Times.

Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say […]

The post The undemocratic reality of US capitalism appeared first on Asia Times.

Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade” (less or minimal government intervention in international markets). Free trade policies facilitated “globalization,” the euphemism for the post-1970 surge in US corporations’ investing abroad: […]

The post Don’t believe Biden or Trump – tariffs don’t protect jobs appeared first on Asia Times.

In 1863, Russian social critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky published a novel titled What Is to Be Done? Its story revolves around a central heroine, Vera Pavlovna, and her four dreams. It brilliantly intertwines her personal life and the social turmoil of Russia’s transition at the time from feudalism to capitalism. Chernyshevsky, a revolutionary imprisoned by the […]

The post What is to be done? appeared first on Asia Times.

In the United Kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation prepared and published data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in January about different nations’ growth forecasts for 2023 and 2024. The BBC foregrounded some really bad news for the UK. Of nine major industrial economies – the Group of Seven (the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, the […]

The post Economic growth in G7 versus BRICS: a reality check appeared first on Asia Times.

On the one hand, US policy aims to constrain China’s economic, political, and military development because it has now become the United States’ chief economic competitor and thus enemy. On the other hand, US policy seeks to secure the many benefits to the United States of its companies’ trade with and investments in China. US […]

The post US leaders split on China policy appeared first on Asia Times.

Early US capitalism was centered in New England. After some time, the pursuit of profit led many capitalists to leave that area and move production to New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Much of New England was left with abandoned factory buildings and depressed towns evident to this day. Eventually employers moved again, abandoning New […]

The post Why capitalism is leaving the US, in search of profit appeared first on Asia Times.

The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Chinese spy” balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China. White House economists have been trying to excuse […]

The post The fatal contradictions of China-bashing appeared first on Asia Times.

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 faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output comes from the BRICS countries while the G7 […]

The post World economy changing – Americans know, but their leaders don’t appeared first on Asia Times.

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 widely welcomed reassurances. One of the latter, market fundamentalism, invites and deserves criticism as a major obstacle to navigating this time of rapid […]

The post ‘Market fundamentalism’ is an obstacle to social progress appeared first on Asia Times.

The emerging new always both frightens and inspires the fading old. History is evidence of that unity of opposites. Sharp-edged rejections of what is new clash with enthusiastic celebrations of it. The old gets pushed away even as bitter denials of that reality surge. The emerging new world economy displays just such contradictions. Four major […]

The post The emerging new world economy appeared first on Asia Times.

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 European Union) for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. US capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. Europe’s role as a […]

The post The economic realities we face at the end of 2022 appeared first on Asia Times.

Russia’s war on Ukraine both reflects and deepens a global split that should remind us of Karl Marx’ famous remark: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence […]

The post How US, China use their power to regulate capitalism appeared first on Asia Times.

To the motives for war in human history, capitalism added another: profit. That motive drove technological advancement and created a genuine world economy. It also built new capitalist empires, such as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Japanese, and American empires. Each of these countries built its empire by various means, including wars […]

The post The role of capitalism in the war in Ukraine appeared first on Asia Times.

US capitalism was, in certain ways, the world’s most successful capitalism until recently. Better than the capitalist systems of Britain, Germany and Japan, US capitalism avoided two key traps. First, it found a remarkable way to manage the capitalist-worker-class struggle for a long time before it lost that capacity. The United States also found a […]

The post What China learned from US capitalism’s development appeared first on Asia Times.

The US wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die […]

The post Why the troubled US empire could quickly fall apart appeared first on Asia Times.

The economy of the People’s Republic of China has been growing much faster than that of the United States for decades. So too has China’s average real wage. China is now the world’s second superpower, catching up to the United States economically if not (yet) militarily. Its political influence grew alongside its gross domestic product. […]

The post US underestimates China’s economic challenge at its own peril appeared first on Asia Times.

Former president Donald Trump gave diminishing lip service to (or just ignored) neoliberal orthodoxy to push for and get massive government interventions into US capitalism. His successor Joe Biden has followed suit. Most of what remains of private capitalism is surviving on unprecedented massive government life support, monetary and fiscal. A tired rerun of Cold […]

The post Why the neoliberal drive is running out of gas appeared first on Asia Times.

Throughout its history – wherever it arrived and settled in as the dominant economic system – capitalism has provoked struggles over the redistribution of wealth. In other words, this system always distributes wealth in a particular way and likewise produces dissatisfaction with that particular distribution. Those dissatisfied then struggle, more or less, consciously or not, […]

The post Why we need to democratize wealth appeared first on Asia Times.

Like all previous economic systems in recorded history, capitalism is on track to repeat the same three-step trip: birth, evolution, and death. The timing and other specifics of each system’s trip differ. Births and evolutions are commonly experienced as positive, celebrated for their progress and promise. The declines and deaths, however, are often denied and […]

The post Increasing desperation as US capitalist system declines appeared first on Asia Times.