Housing has become one of the most politically charged economic issues in Spain. Rising rents, the difficulty of finding available apartments, and the increasingly delayed transition of many young people into independent living generate understandable frustration. When access to an essential good becomes difficult, the temptation quickly arises to identify a visible culprit: landlords, property platforms, investment funds, speculators, or simply “the market.”
Continue readingcommunism
From Marxist Materialism to a Material Measure of Progress
It would nevertheless be too easy to say that mainland China’s consumer materialism has nothing to do with Marxism simply because Marx himself criticized commodity fetishism. Marxist historical materialism and consumer materialism are conceptually different, but ideas also matter through the political institutions and policy priorities constructed from them.
Continue reading