“We got to do something now, the company are not going to do anything and we got to protect ourselves,” proclaimed a shop steward at Lucas Aerospace when filmed by a 1978 documentary by the Open University. He was explaining the rationale behind the so-called Alternative Corporate Plan, better known as the Lucas Plan. It … Keep reading »

Dr. Richard Roman, co-author of Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America discusses how NAFTA deepened and ‘constitutionalized’ neoliberal reforms already underway. Watch video »

In the British Labour Party’s 2017 election manifesto, the pledges to abolish university tuition fees and reintroduce maintenance grants were widely seen as vote winners, but that was the extent of the party’s policy commitments toward the sector. Since the election, Labour has supported staff and students in challenging the yawning gap between highly-paid vice-chancellors … Keep reading »

When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5-billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize. Keep reading »

The global financial crisis has done next to nothing to change the convictions of mainstream economists. But the widespread lament over their willful blindness seems misplaced: there was never a realistic possibility that the economics profession would voluntarily break with the methodological sophistication and statistical formalism at the heart of its identity. Keep reading »

Toronto – 26 October 2017 Higher education in our politically desperate age is threatened by a legacy that it does not dare to name and that legacy with its eerie resonance with an authoritarian past asserts itself, in part, with the claim that education is failing. The Trump administration needs education to fail in a … Watch video »

It is only over the past decade-and-a-half or so that scholars have begun to explore in greater depth the ideological roots of the neoliberal project. Such contributions tend to focus on the emergence of a distinctly neoliberal critique of ‘collectivism’ (especially as expressed in the post-war welfare state and the state-planned economies like the Soviet … Keep reading »

Powerful corporations and the rich in the United States continue their winning ways. By narrow margins, both the House of Representatives and Senate have agreed on a budget proposal that calls for an increase in the federal deficit of $1.5-trillion in order to fund a major reform of the U.S. tax system that will make … Keep reading »

A decade on from the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the majority of private banks have changed very little. Most remain solely concerned with maximizing their returns, while sustainable or social goals remain subservient to this. For conventional economists, anything else remains an impossible or distant dream. But there is hope for a different kind of … Keep reading »

General Electric (GE) is moving out of Peterborough. It leaves the town, the county, Ontario and Canada with an enormous mess. One of the world’s largest conglomerates has become the poster child for a sick corporate citizen in a sick economic system. It’s not just about leaving hundreds of former workers dead or dying of … Keep reading »

The metabolic exchange between nature and society in a mode of production based upon value So many accusations have been levelled against Karl Marx and, to an even greater extent, his friend and co-author Friedrich Engels in the 150 years since Capital was first published (in German in 1867) that the charges are almost too many … Keep reading »

Capitalism is ugly. The major villains at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, AIG, were not impelled by any desperate need they had to meet, or by their lack of education and opportunities, the circumstances that lead the poor to commit crimes. They were acting as self-seeking, greedy, venal individuals … Keep reading »