Category: Capitalism

Jorge Lobo Miglioli (1935-2025): Marx, Kalecki and the desenvolvimentistas dream in Brazil

Carolina AlvesLeave a comment

I met Professor Jorge Miglioli in 2000, the year I started my undergraduate studies in Economics at UNESP, Araraquara 鈥� Brazil, fully convinced it was the right path if you wanted to change the world. I did briefly consider Sociology too, but my mum (like any another mum who dreams of their children doing better than they did) put her foot down: I didn鈥檛 work this hard to give you a good education just so you could become a schoolteacher! That settled it.

Just a little over a month into the course, I found myself in the middle of one of the longest national university strikes in Brazil. For context: Brazilian universities are publicly funded by both national and state governments, and higher education is tuition-free. That strike, so early in my academic journey, made me question whether I had chosen the right course. Most of my peers simply returned to their hometowns instead of staying and engaging with what was happening. It wouldn鈥檛 be fair to say they were against the strike; they just didn鈥檛 care. Many of them came from the Brazilian middle class or up, which reflects the schizophrenia of our tuition-free higher education system. They were on a clear path to join the elite, working in banks, big corporations, and so on, and the strike had simply disrupted that trajectory. They just wanted to get back to their normal lives. Things were even worse in my department, the Department of Economics, where only two, maybe three professors supported the strike. The majority made it clear they were against it and disappeared for the entire duration, which lasted nearly four months

On the bright side, that moment introduced me to fellow Economics students who stayed, supported the strike, and opened the door to an economics that actually mattered 鈥� they would also become dear friends. It was through them that I first encountered Karl Marx. I also met Renata Belzunces, the student leading the strike in my campus, admired by many, including Professor Jorge Miglioli, and who went to become one of the most inspiring role models I鈥檝e ever had.[1] And it was in this moment that I met Professor Jorge Miglioli too.

Miglioli, who eventually became 鈥淢iglis鈥� to me, a nickname he never fully liked but accepted nonetheless (I鈥檓 not sure I ever gave him much choice!), was different. There were no 鈥榖uts鈥� with Miglioli when it came to the strike. I remember him saying something like How else do you expect capitalists and the government to hear us? But it wasn鈥檛 just what he said, it was how he said it. There was no attempt to convince, no rhetorical flourish. It was more like: why are we even debating this? His tone carried a kind of quiet certainty, and beneath it, a deep frustration and disillusionment with the fact that this even needed to be explained.

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How Philanthrocapitalism Will Not Save the World Health Organisation

viveknenminiLeave a comment

In the past two decades, global health governance has undergone a quiet revolution, shaped less by sovereign states and more by the growing influence of private capital. The World Health Organisation (WHO), once envisioned as the democratic engine of international public health, has increasingly come to rely on large-scale philanthropic foundations. This shift toward what is now commonly termed 鈥攚here billionaire-funded entities use business strategies and methods to tackle social and environmental challenges鈥攈as profound implications. It is not just a matter of money, but of power, accountability and legitimacy. Amid what many now describe as a , the WHO鈥檚 growing dependence on a handful of wealthy private actors has exposed deep cracks in the system of multilateralism upon which it was founded. Thus, philanthrocapitalism is undermining democratic global health governance by concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy and eroding public accountability.

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Digital Lords or Capitalist Titans? Critiquing the Techno-Feudalism Narrative

Arif NoviantoLeave a comment

In recent years, the rise of platform monopolies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft has sparked a growing discourse among scholars and public intellectuals, many of whom describe these developments through the lens of a supposed return to feudal structures. This narrative, often labeled as techno-feudalism or digital feudalism, suggests that contemporary digital capitalism is no longer driven primarily by labor exploitation, but by rent extraction and control over digital infrastructures (Varoufakis, 2021).

Prominent left-leaning thinkers such as Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, McKenzie Wark, Jodi Dean, David Arditi, and Robert Kuttner have employed the techno-feudalism framework to highlight the increasing asymmetries of power and wealth in the digital age.

The term has gained significant traction, not least because of its rhetorical force and capacity to evoke historical imaginaries of servitude, hierarchy, and immobility (Morozov, 2022). Yet its growing popularity has also introduced analytical imprecision, with many adopting the label as a buzzword rather than engaging critically with its implications. At first glance, the metaphor appears appealing: today鈥檚 tech giants resemble lords presiding over digital fiefdoms, extracting value from users and workers who have little choice but to submit to the rules of the platform. However, this article argues that such analogies are conceptually flawed and politically misleading.

Drawing on the tradition of critical political economy, this paper challenges the techno-feudalism thesis by contending that the digital economy remains deeply embedded within capitalist logics, particularly in its monopolistic and financialized forms. What we are witnessing is not a reversion to feudal relations, but an intensification of capitalist accumulation strategies under new technological conditions. Platform monopolies do not derive power from land ownership or inherited status, but from their capacity to commodify data, enforce algorithmic control, and monetize access to essential infrastructures鈥攅specially through cloud computing and digital platforms. These dynamics do not mark a rupture from capitalism but rather its latest mutation, in which market domination is achieved through the mechanisms of monopoly, not feudal hierarchy.

By debunking the techno-feudalism myth, this article seeks to redirect the critique toward the enduring structures of capitalist domination that continue to define the digital economy. Understanding Big Tech as capitalist titans, rather than digital lords, offers a more precise analytical lens for grasping the mechanisms of exploitation, accumulation, and control that shape the contemporary political economy of platforms.

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So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies

alemezzadriLeave a comment

In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by builds a strong case against calls to 鈥渦niversalize鈥� Development Studies shifting the focus from 鈥淚nternational鈥� to 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization 鈥� at least in the two influential 鈥減andemic papers鈥� the collective thoroughly revises, one is main-authored by and the other by 鈥� are misguided. As convincingly argued by the collective, these calls tone down the structural historical nature of the Global North-Global South divide; they erase development paradigms and understandings from the Global South and trivialize the nature of challenges emerging from long histories of colonialization and plunder, which still regenerate along global value chains and networks, as authors like have shown, as well as distinct regimes of social reproduction and contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as I explain here and .

Yet, universalizing and globalizing are not the same thing; they can be operated in distinct ways, and through entirely different intellectual projects. Moreover, the discipline of Development Studies, in its mainstream dominant avatar, badly needs 鈥済lobalizing,鈥� given its Eurocentrism 鈥� yet in ways that center the experiences in/of the majority world; think through plural frameworks and locations; and speak to the extraordinarily diverse material realities and practices of power, inequality, and subordination across our planet. Crucially, such experiences, realities, and practices are, at once, the result of trajectories mediated by the Global North-Global South Divide, as emphasized in critical International Development frameworks, yet also always been global in nature 鈥� calling for Global Development lenses 鈥� unlike what narrow development economic theorizing heavily relying on modernization theory has and still suggest/ed. Ultimately, one may wonder: in the debate between 鈥淚nternational鈥� and 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development, why and what exactly do we need to choose?

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Walt Rostow鈥檚 development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow鈥檚 advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.

Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.

To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.

Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.

No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916鈥�2003).

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Amartya Sen鈥檚 Work Shows Us the Human Cost of Capitalist Development

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen鈥檚 own analytical framework doesn鈥檛 go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.

Amartya Sen is one of the most influential thinkers about development in the contemporary world. Since the 1970s, he has published widely across the disciplines of economics and philosophy. He received the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1998. In 2010,聽Time聽magazine rated Sen as one of the world鈥檚 one hundred most influential people.

There is a predominant notion of development trumpeted by international institutions, many academics and journalists, and politicians of most stripes. It holds that economic growth provides the basis for human development. Given that under capitalism, economic growth is for the most part rooted in capital accumulation, 鈥済rowth-first鈥� notions of development are essentially capital-first notions.

This way of thinking places capitalist firms, managers, and the states that back them at the helm of the human development project. It conveniently excuses the ways in which such growth generates, and is often based upon, novel forms of poverty and oppression for workers. Sen鈥檚 writings pose a major challenge to the growth-first/capital-first idea of development.

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The labor of land

ramasalladieng1 Comment

Contemporary  and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a  . A central question is about , and its implications for structural transformation and .

Extraversion, exports and the labor question

In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital were historically linked to the quest for new labor and cash crops (cotton, then groundnut, followed by fresh fruits and vegetables) in frontier markets for Europe. Some of these transformations have been widely documented by Egyptian economist , Senegalese historian  and American historian . In 1819, the Ndiaw Treaty between France and the leaders of the Waalo Kingdom (in northern Senegal) was signed, allowing France to . This agricultural colonization project failed mostly because of the resistance of the inhabitants of the Waalo Kingdom (the Waalo-Waalo) and the inability of  French colonial leaders to secure land concessions they thought were automatically and permanently transferred to them through the treaty. The Waalo leaders, who managed the land on behalf of their community, understood otherwise. This conflicting interpretation on how land is governed became a recurrent source of conflict.

Another problem was the shortage of labor鈥攖he Waalo-Waalo refused forced labor and preferred to cultivate their subsistence crops rather than those for export. This refusal led to the return of clandestine slave trade and related abuses. The insecurity created by Waalo鈥檚 neighbors and the resistance of merchant capital added to the failure. These are key to understanding how various historical dynamics have sedimented to make the Senegal River Valley Region (historical Waalo) the site of the land rush that began in 2007-2008, especially for the production of export fresh fruits and vegetables.

Revisiting this rich history offers us a better understanding of relations of exploitation and contemporary resistance to  by a number of communities in this region. It is a reminder of the violence of primitive accumulation, a violence that is ongoing. Tanzanian historian  puts it well:

The early encounter of Africa with Europe was not commercial involving the exchange of commodities, but rather the unilateral looting of human resources. African slavery was neither a trade, nor a mode of production. It was simply a robbery of a people on a continental scale perpetrated over four centuries through force of arms.

Despite the subsequent attempt to develop new crops in 1826 in Saint-Louis, merchant capital eventually prevailed with the failure of agriculture. As a result, post-colonial leaders 鈥渋nherited a country organized by and for merchant capital鈥� after 1960 as  puts it. In the same vein,  note how merchant capital subsequently established colonial and post-colonial structures of extraction.

Beyond processes of land acquisition, it is important to pay attention to how land becomes capital and how agricultural workers are included, excluded, or rather  into these agri-food networks.For instance, in her 2011  on land grabbing in Southern Africa, Ruth Hall provides a useful typology of agricultural transformations from subsistence to capitalist imperatives. Besides models that are based on the displacement of primary producers and the establishment of large export-oriented agricultural estates, Hall emphasizes 鈥渃ommercialization in situ鈥� and 鈥渙utgrower鈥� schemes whereby petty commodity producers and other land users are incorporated into commercial value chains. This is a further invite to go beyond  in our analyses of the genealogy of  and of processes of exploitation.

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Ha-Joon Chang has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang is a brilliant, best-selling critic of neoliberal orthodoxy. But Chang stops far short of taking the necessary next step: questioning the capitalist system itself.

Ha-Joon Chang is a rarity in the contemporary world: an聽聽who is highly critical of the neoliberal free-market orthodoxy, advocates progressive social change, writes and speaks accessibly, and is very, very popular.

Chang鈥檚 books have sold millions of copies, and he is a regular contributor to mainstream media outlets. According to Chang himself, his aim is not simply to challenge free-market orthodoxy, but also to support, through his work, the kind of 鈥渁ctive economic citizenship鈥� that will demand 鈥渢he right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.鈥�

While socialists can learn a lot from Ha-Joon Chang鈥檚 work, we also need to read it critically and identify some of the gaps in his thinking. Chang鈥檚 self-professed aspiration is to promote an alternative form of capitalism, but our goal should be to develop an alternative聽迟辞听capitalism.

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