Editor's note: A Spanish translation of this article is available here. Introduction The notion that the rich are rich because they’re frugal, smart, entrepreneurial, and hardworking, and that the poor are poor because they’re wasteful, lazy, stupid, and irresponsible...
A 2020 report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “Between 1990 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth soared 1,130 percent in 2020 dollars, an increase more than 200 times greater than the 5.37 percent growth of U.S. median wealth over this same period" [1]. In...
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for...
The Marxist view of society starts with questions of power, such as: who holds power, how, and to what end? In class societies, these questions focus on issues of ownership, since ownership determines who has the power to decide what happens with land, banks, mines,...
After the deaths of Marx and Engels, socialists began taking up the important task of summarizing their work for popularization. In 1919, for example, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, argued that the essence of Marx’s project is not the correctness or...
How would socialism address the terrible problems of capitalist society? The following is an edited version of a talk given by Brian Becker, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Executive Committee, at an East Coast PSL membership conference. We...
The economic reality of the United States today is one of vast inequality in wealth and living standards. At present, 31.1 million households do not have enough food to eat in an average year. Housing within the means of average Americans is increasingly scarce,...
The first time the people had the power The capitalist class and its well-paid intellectuals and pundits continue to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 means that socialism and communism are impossible. A stereotyped and negative image of the Soviet Union...
Oppression and exploitation are basic features of capitalist society. Workers are paid wages while the capitalist owners make profits from the products created by those who work. This is the essence of economic exploitation. Almost every worker, even if they do not...