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Pushing back against Capital’s Devaluation: Workers versus Eco-Destructive Multinational Corporations

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Caravanserai Pushing Back Against Capital’s Devaluation: Workers versus Eco-Destructive Multinational Corporations Patrick Bond May 1, 2026 The overaccumulation of capital at the world scale has never been worse in absolute terms. Capital is especially frenetic within the feral financial markets, amplifying extreme uneven development across the world system, but especially in the periphery and even middle-income Asia, as a result of the accompanying geopolitical stresses. Although the excess of capacity of productive capitals, in this cycle, is mainly emanating from the east coast of China , David Harvey has described the most visible and volatile aspect of overaccumulation as, more generally, a “surplus of liquidity sloshing around in the world’s money markets. The rising mass of money seeking opportunities for ‘productive’ investment is harder and harder to accommodate.” The logic of over-accumulated capital includes not only displacing the problem across space and time, i.e. th...

Autocracy, Democracy and EcoSocialism in the Geosphere

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Caravanserai Autocracy, Democracy and EcoSocialism in the Geosphere Christopher Chase-Dunn   April 1, 2026  Thanks to Editors Devparna Roy and Dan Pasciuti for inviting me to kick off a new JWSR events commentary series – the Caravanserai. The most common definition of caravanserai is “an inn where travelers stay”, but an alternative meaning is “a group traveling together” --a caravan. I prefer the second because my comments are intended for those scholars and activists who are journeying together on a wide road to study and analyze world-systems and to alter the future of the contemporary global system in a more progressive direction. The event that I want to foreground happened on January 1, 2025, when democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the Mayor of New York City. It is hard to step back from current events in the middle of a chaotic time of troubles (polycrises) like the one we are in. But, as Fernand Braudel said: “ Events are the ephemera of his...