Global
“Degrowth” may often be associated with the left, but can also have conservative—even ecofascist—implications. What do proponents and critics mean by “degrowth”? How do these differences play out ideologically? Ying Chen writes that, for radicals, the answer is to place the economic system at the center of the degrowth narrative, thus naming the system that must be replaced with a more just and equitable socialist society. | more…
Historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century narrative in the West, is understood as confined to social sciences and humanities. However, John Bellamy Foster writes, Marx and Engels did not have such a limited conception, instead engaging with the natural sciences, providing insight into the dialectics of nature. | more…
Helena Sheehan turns her incisive eye on the so-called anti-disinformation industry, and wondering whether the mainstream media is using a newfound interest in fact-checking, fake news, and disinformation studies to conceal deeper biases, ones that occlude the hidden ideologies deceiving much of the public. | more…
In this interview, originally published in the Czech journal Contradictions, John Bellamy Foster discusses the history of environmental thought among socialists from Marx to the present day, with a view to the need to mobilize in order to protect humanity’s only home. | more…
What did Marx mean in his discussion of “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital? Here, Ian Angus argues that the term is widely misunderstood—but its illumination reveals great insight to the conditions of exploitation and expropriation. | more…
The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. | more…
Capital, Ben Selwyn writes, has been advancing its interests under the guise of protecting “global supply chain resilience.” While those promoting the resilience agenda assert that these supply chains represent a net benefit, evidence suggests that they increase the transfer of surplus value from the Global North and, especially, in the. South. | more…
As capitalism continues to fuel the planetary crisis, David Barkin and Brian M. Napoletano propose that the communitarian revolutionary subject is already prefiguring alternatives constructed around the principles of self-determination, substantive equality, and sustainability. | more…
In this reprise from October 1993, Henry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ask: “Isn’t there anyone around here who understands how this capitalist system works?” | more…
As C. Wright Mills wrote in 1958, “the immediate causes of World War III are the preparations for it.” This month’s “Notes from the Editors” situates Mills’s words in a contemporary context, with a New Cold War in full swing and imperial powers pushing us ever closer to a Third World War. | more…
February’s Review of the Month confronts the new irrationalism and its reactionary tendencies, which find their roots in troubling philosophical and historical foundations. The answer, John Bellamy Foster writes, can be found in a return to historical materialism. | more…
The Half-Earth movement calls for rewilidng half the earth as a means of combating the planetary crisis. Brian Napoletano explores the implications of the Half-Earth approach as outlined Vettese and Pendergrass’s Half-Earth Socialism. | more…