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Notes from the Editors
July-August 2026 (Volume 78, Number 3)
This month's "Notes from the Editors," originally published in May by the German Quarterly, explores the last few decades of U.S. belligerence in Iran, culminating in the Trump administration's recent acts of war in the region. Together with Israel, the Editors write, the United States "has entrapped itself in an imperialist war that it cannot win," thus underscoring the necessity of a global anti-imperialist peace movement.
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Introduction
The Global Structural Crisis of Capital
John Bellamy Foster introduces our special summer issue on the "Structural Crisis of Capital," illuminating its four main characteristics as first outlined by István Mészáros in Marx's Theory of Alienation. Capital, Foster says, has found itself in a position akin to Lucian's sorcerer's apprentice: futilely attempting to control a runaway system that he had himself created, accumulating not only contradictions but outright catastrophe—with globe-spanning consequences.
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Article
On the Economic Crisis of Capitalism
Considering the "Structural Crisis of Capital" from the perspective of economics, Prabhat Patnaik sheds light on two major aspects that have risen to prominence in our current conjuncture. The first, rampant stagnation and unemployment, is clear and undeniable. The second, particular to the capitalism of the late twentieth century and the shedding of colonies on which imperial nations depended for wealth is particularly salient to Trump's economic strategy of economic recolonization not only through soft power, but direct military action.
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Article
Between the Times: Privatized Keynesianism, Permanent Catastrophe, and the Task of an Economy of Social Production
"Old-style neoliberalism," write Riccardo Bellofiore and Giovanna Vertova "is dead, or at least gravely ill. The new paradigm that may replace it has not yet been born or is not yet recognizable. In the middle, between the times, lies what we have proposed to call the permanent catastrophe: a regime in which capitalist responses in catastrophic form have become the norm, in which crises are no longer overcome but accumulate."
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Article
U.S. Imperialism Resurgent
It is quite evident, Costas Lapavitsas begins, that the world is currently ensnared in geopolitical turmoil, perhaps for over a decade. In this article, Lapavitsas provides insight into the inseparable and interlocking mechanisms of dollar dominance and imperialism backed by the escalatory militarism of the second Trump administration. As Lapavitsas notes: "The dollar and the F-35—monetary coercion and military power—are two moments of a single structure of domination."
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Article
Monetary Policy and Capitalism
Jan Toporowski explains our contemporary age of "monetary policy dominance": the era in which the setting of short-term interest rates by the central banks is seen as the key instrument for regulating economic activity. This, however, does not reflect an ironclad law of the business cycle but, rather, a set of assumptions that underscores the dependence of capitalism on the accumulation of capital itself. This in turn obscures deeper truths about the effectiveness of monetary policy on the daily lives of the working class.
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Article
Imperialism in a Full World: Neomercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game
Since the wane of mercantilism in Europe, conceptions of wealth, trade, and productivity have also changed: from one of a zero-sum game reliant only on the productivity of land, to one of the potential for positive-sum wealth created by industry, and, now, to the zero-sum neomercantilism necessitated in a world of resource depletion, where the earth is pushed to its biophysical limits. But the response to this crisis does not have to be further fortification—it could also be a world that organizes itself within the metabolic limitations of nature.
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Article
Value Chains in the Digital Age: Labor Exploitation and Systemic Ecocide
In order to comprehend the environmental crisis that goes hand-in-hand with the "Structural Crisis of Capital," we must also understand the nature of global value chains and how they contribute to environmental degradation and worker exploitation on a global level. Benjamin Selwyn elucidates how global value chains and digitalization sit within a "conjoined dynamic of labor-exploitative accumulation and ecological expropriation."
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Article
Tech Billionaires, the AI Threat, and Resistance
Martin Hart-Landsberg gives an in-depth account of the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and their embrace of transhumanist ideologies that celebrate individualism and technological advancement above all else. However, he asserts, all is not lost, as growing dissatisfaction with capitalism "is slowly but steadily helping to grow a movement of resistance"—a resistance that must recognize that it is not just tech billionaires but capitalism itself threatening humanity's chance at a better future.
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Article
Capitalism and Cognition: The Fate of Science in a System in Decline
The world is being roiled by a crisis of meaning, leading to a pervasive sense of despair and stagnation. Helena Sheehan gives an account of the present-day epistemological nihilism resulting from the corrosion of "the foundations of knowledge production"—that is to say, the devaluing of rigorous scientific inquiry and the rise of irrationalism. Marxism provides us with both an understanding of how this crisis of cognition relates to the "Structural Crisis of Capitalism," as well as the socialist opposition that seeks to resolve its manifold contradictions.
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Review of the Month
The Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States
MR associate editor Brett Clark and editor John Bellamy Foster explore "the death drive of late imperialism" and its manifestations in an ecological crisis that is not parallel to, but inseparable from, increasingly open ecofascism in the United States. Drawing from Luckács's Destruction of Reason and István Mészáros's work on imperialism, Clark and Foster present a materialist analysis that illuminates the cult of unreason so pervasive under capitalism and imperialism while pointing to a path forward that is grounded in the historical-materialist Marxist tradition.
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Article
The Thermodynamics of Capital: Artificial Intelligence, Energy Crisis, and Ecological Crisis
Te Li unravels the myth of digital dematerialization so heavily promulgated by Silicon Valley and other AI boosters, which presents the technology as a phenomenon that has escaped the material realm and thus, entropy itself. In fact, Li shows that the material and energetic requirements of AI places it squarely in the physical realm, then situates the technology within the context of the metabolic rift under capitalism.
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Article
Workers Suffer as Wealth Accumulates: Finance as Grift and Other Revelations
Fred Magdoff presents an incisive, data-driven analysis of the current state of the worker laboring under the domineering system of financialization and, in particular, private equity. In his conclusion, Magdoff asks: "Is there a way out of twenty-first-century 'normal' for labor?" "The key way out," he answers, "is an extraordinary growth of workers' power in order to combat the extraordinary power of capital"—one rooted in fully democratic socialist production and fundamental equality.
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“‘Black Marxism’: A Marxist Critique”, by August Nimtz
August Nimtz defends Marxism from Cedric Robinson’s accusations of myopia on matters of race, suggesting that, in charging Marx and Engels with Eurocentrism, he either failed to understand, or misrepresented, their work—and that, in effect, many thinkers inspired by Black Marxism blatantly misrepresented Marxist texts. Especially in his writings about the U.S. Civil War, Marx had far more to say about race than is commonly understood, Nimtz shows....
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“Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?'”
The latest: Einstein's perspective links alienation and nuclear annihilation, capitalism to the devastating possibility of omnicide -- the destruction of all human life on earth. As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary....
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Notice what Kohei Saito was reading when his career went soaring?
In this image, Kohei Saito holds a copy of "Monopoly Capital," by Baran and Sweezy. Saito’s book "Capital in the Anthropocene" (not to be confused with John Bellamy Foster's book by a similar name) has become an unlikely hit among younger readers...
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John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”
The latest: The title of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book "derives from Lucretius’s famed De Rerum Natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius wrote: “Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order – if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will break the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect – what is the source of the free [will] … .” ([On the Nature of Things,] Book II, 251ff) This exact quotation, moreover, was one made by Karl Marx in his Epicurean Notebooks, compiled in preparation for his doctoral thesis: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” of 1841. From this point of departure, Foster initiates the reappraisal of two thousand years of philosophical controversy...."
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