How much does it cost to maintain an empire? A stunning new analysis by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster shows the true scale of U.S. military spending, which far outstrips conventional estimates, which use data gleaned from traditional sources. | more…
Chip War (Simon and Schuster, 2022) by Chris Miller is a detailed accounting of the U.S. efforts to retain control of the computer chip industry—an industry that has become vital to nearly all aspects of modern life. Rahul Varman explores and expands on these themes, asking all the while: What can the escalating wars over this crucial technology teach us about global capitalism? | more…
Kyung-Pil Kim charts the history of the Korean platform economy through the rise of Naver and Kakao, the major firms dominating the markets. How do these companies operate? How did they achieve dominance? Finally, what are recent developments and challenges of labor organizing in this sphere? | more…
At the center of the United States’s New Cold War MR editors write, is the World Trade Organization, “the crown jewel of the liberal international order.” After China’s admittance into the WTO did not lead to the collapse of socialism in that country, presidents from Obama to Biden have gutted the institution and escalated the tariff war, all in the name of protecting the so-called rules-based international order. | more…
What is the state of health care in China? Wei Zhang analyzes the deep institutional issues that plague China’s health care system. Despite its timely and effective efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis, the system still faces deep-seated challenges, many of which can be traced directly to the marketization of hospitals and medical care. | more…
A unique historical account of poor peoples’ self-defence strategies in the face of the plunder of their lands and labor
For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital.
As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons, mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged
Michael Lebowitz expounds on the simple truths found in Marx’s theory of value—truths that, nonetheless, have been obscured by decades of incomplete theorizing that has failed to make key distinctions in the relationship between labor, value, and money. | more…
Having just written his groundbreaking book, The American Revolution, Detroit autoworker James Boggs sat down in the early 1960s to continue his study of revolution. Boggs looked at the Black Power uprisings then beginning in the United States within the global context of the overthrow of rightwing puppet regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Racism and the Class Struggle, Boggs produced thirteen powerful and prescient chapters that wrestled with topics such as the specific character of American capitalism and its intricate relationship to American democracy, the historic mission of the Black revolution in the United States, and the need for the 1960s Black
Increasingly, scholarship around degrowth and socialism are coalescing around certain shared ideas, namely, that capitalism is at the root of our planetary crisis. Güney Işıkara and Özgür Narin draw out key points of convergence among these thinkers, as well as discrepancies in the two approaches to creating a future egalitarian and sustainable society. | more…
There is a common misconception among critics that degrowth proponents do not engage with the question of technology, instead leaving the implementation of technological solutions to the planetary crisis to green growth advocates. Jason Hickel shows that not only is this narrative false, it obscures the possibilities for technology unfettered by capitalism. | more…
Minqi Li asks: How can China, the world’s largest energy consumer, be “de-grown”? What policies and institutions must change, and what are the potential social implications? How can social ownership of production, redistribution of wealth the working class, and democratically controlled planning bring the country closer to a zero growth scenario? | more…
Kent Klitgaard surveys degrowth thought, starting with the essential contradiction of capitalism presented by Marx, which gives rise to our current planetary crisis. Through an understanding this contradiction and degrowth literature spanning twentieth century, the author presents a plan for a sustainable and planned future socialist society. | more…