Seth Sandronsky

May 23, 2025
Intan Suwandi is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Illinois State University and the author of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2019). I requested her views on how and why the world trading system helps the corporations in Europe, Japan and the U.S. (the ruling Triad of modern capitalism) and harms the Global South, an underreported viewpoint. That critique is the special focus of her book.
Seth Sandronsky: What are your thou...

William Peterson, who has lived in Sacramento since second grade, is a ceramic artist who likes to take landscape photos through aircraft windows. “A lot of my work is from an aerial perspective,” he says. “I love the formations and the geometry of nature and manmade structures.”
Peterson’s ceramic art blends clay and glaze, each of which has distinct properties that change when they interact. Call it the dialectics — of qualitative and quantitative change — of Peterson’s aerially-inspired ar...

May 9, 2025
Material reality, or kitchen table issues such as groceries and rent, shapes ideology and systemic thinking about the political economy of living and working. The current moment of social tumult has been gathering steam since the end of the Vietnam War, which heralded the sunset of a postwar U.S. economy of broad-based prosperity.
Dubbed neoliberalism under successive Democratic and Republican presidents, a political economy of corporations and the wealthy lobbying for and receivi...

May 2, 2025
Politically speaking, it is useful to follow the money, the donor dollars. The more greenbacks flow to America’s bipartisan political system, the greater influence that money has to shape domestic and foreign policies. The poor and working classes in and out of America suffer the adverse consequences.
In the U.S., the lack of universal healthcare, a main cause of personal bankruptcies, is a case in point. The medical-industrial complex donated a total of $750,838,554 in the 2024 e...

April 25, 2025
Fourteen U.S. workers, on average, died at work daily in 2023, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH). Moreover, an estimated 120,000 workers pass away from workplace injuries due to occupational diseases and illnesses from ongoing exposure to toxic chemicals, unsafe air, and overall labor exploitation every year, according to the 501(c)3 nonprofit group’s annual Dirty Dozen list, released April 24, containing data on employers that...

April 18, 2025
As a gap between billionaires and everybody else swells, a bipartisan project decades in the making, Jodi Dean, author and professor, considers if we are living through a change in the form of capitalism into what she terms “neofeudalism,” writing in Capital’s Grave (Verso Books, 2025). The book’s title is a reference to a line in The Communist Manifesto about the class relations of capitalism creating its fatal contradictions: “What the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) there...

March 28, 2025
There is growing opposition to the Trump administration’s bid to radically slash federal spending and employment. We turn to Carolina Martinez, who joined the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO) Network as its CEO in 2018. She has served on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, the Berks County Latino Chamber of Commerce board, and the Kutztown University Foundation board, and views a recent proposal to shrink the workfor...

Can you feel it? There is a palpable dread that the ruling class, which owns financial and industrial capital, will continue to invest in destroying the Earth System. One example is the half-dozen biggest American banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance that the UN had supported since 2021, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2050. This choice of financial interests to double down on fossil f...

March 7, 2025
Mainstream punditry on the verbal clash between President Trump and Vice President Vance with Ukraine’s Zelensky over the business-political terms to end the U.S. proxy war with Russia bears a critical look. Consider David Brooks of the New York Times on the PBS Newshour.
The volatile exchange before news media between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky “nauseated” Brooks. He contextualizes that White House spat in the modern history of American foreign policy.
(Magical thinking alert.)...

February 28, 2025
In A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby (Monthly Review Press, 2024), author and English professor John Marsh unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel. As month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading Marsh’s book is a wakeup call to systemic themes and trends.
In a Prologue, Introduction, four chapters and Conclusion, he revisits an influential work of fiction around an enduring “po...

February 21, 2025
My parents, Alex and Sylvia, grew up as Jewish Americans in NYC during the Great Depression. The Bolshevik Revolution had in part shaped the tenor of that era, but socialism had been popular in the USA before this revolutionary change. In the depression era, FDR, responding to the working-class ferment that swept up folks like my mother and father, critiqued elites as economic royalists. Later as adults, my parents held labor union jobs and voted for Democrats, due in the ma...

February 14, 2025
Randell Leach is the CEO of Beneficial State Bank, a regional community bank based in Oakland, CA. He and I conducted via email the interview below about the ongoing shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and what it means for both the financial sector and consumers.
Seth Sandronsky: Generally, what do you think about the head of Office of Management and Budget calling for the CFPB to cease investigations and end the beginning of new rules?
Randell Leac...

February 7, 2025
It is a new day for federal immigration enforcement in the USA. The Donald J. Trump administration’s recent announcement on immigration enforcement is ending the longstanding “sensitive locations” policy, and allows federal immigration arrests at schools, churches and hospitals. This big change will have immediate impacts on immigrant communities in California, America’s most populous state of 39 million people.
This is why. “California is home to 10.6 million immigrants—22% ...