The Puzzle of Financialization
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…
February 2023 (Volume 74, Number 9)
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…
The New Irrationalism
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…
Half-Earth Socialism and the Path Beyond Capital
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…
January 2023 (Volume 74, Number 8)
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” marks the 30-year anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The abject failure of this framework to enact meaningful progress on the planetary crisis continued to be on full display in 2022, including at November’s COP27 in Egypt. | more…
Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment Humanism: A Revolutionary Ecological Perspective
This issue’s Review of the Month discusses Marx’s role as the foremost revolutionary critic of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism. To this day, his conception of “the universal metabolism of nature” remains a powerful antidote to the phantasmagoric “dark ecology” posited by today’s posthumanism. | more…
![NATO und Totenkopf [NATO and Skull]](https://p4r4f7y4.delivery.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Nato-Morder-100x146.jpg)
NATO and the Long War on the Third World
The global balance of power shifting. The resistance to NATO’s push for a New Cold War is growing, particularly among the Third World countries that have historically borne the brunt of the West’s imperial projects. It is the role of socialists living in the imperial core, Paweł Wargan writes, to support the peoples of the Third World as they rise up in the new era. | more…
Reflections on Lenin’s Dialectics
Pyotr Kondrashov takes a deep dive into Lenin’s understanding of social dialectics. This exploration gives rise to an approach to that places the active human subject squarely in the center of a revolutionary Marxism that goes “beyond Marx,” furthering the struggle for a liberated society. | more…
The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity
John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx’s understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only struggle for the advancement of human freedom, but also the capitalist destruction of the earth. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution. | more…
Crypto Convulsions, Digital Delusions, and the Inexorable Logic of Finance Capitalism
The crypto winter, Ramaa Vasudevan writes, is here. Cryptocurrency, far from being a democratizing force in finance, has led to only further concentrations of wealth and power and increased precarity within the financial sector. The recent fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is only the beginning. | more…
Mining Capital and the Indonesian State
Arianto Sangadji traces the relationship between the state and mining capital in Indonesia throughout the historical capitalist development of the country from Dutch colonialism to the contemporary practices of multinational mining corporations. While these powerful firms have generated significant profits, they are also associated with dispossession, environmental degradation, and ruthless labor exploitation, spurring resistance from the local populations. | more…
November 2022 (Volume 74, Number 6)
The latest Review of the Month, written by Spanish geologist Carles Soriano, considers the implications of idea of the Capitalocene, the historical determinations affecting the study of the Earth Sciences, and how our views of the current planetary crisis are often shaped by inadequate narratives. Current approaches, he writes are “non-dialectic and non-materialist regarding the study of social reproduction modes, and this renders the whole understanding of the planetary crisis not only incomplete but idealist, for the capitalist mode is assumed as absolute rather than historical.” | more…