John Clegg is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.
The labor theory of value is one of Marxism’s most contested ideas. Both critics and supporters of socialism have labeled it inconsistent and outdated. In an interview with Jacobin, economist Duncan Foley offers a full-throated defense.
With an incarceration rate exceeding 700 people for every 100,000, Americans have built a prison monstrosity that has few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. We need to study the economic origins of this mass incarceration system in order to dismantle it.
The New York Times is right that slavery made a major contribution to capitalist development in the United States — just not in the way they imagine.