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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
Why Can China Resist Financialization?
Over the last half-century, the "financial explosion"—manifest in the unrestrained expansion of financialization and its tools and institutions—has fundamentally reshaped the global economy, impacting countries throughout the Global North and South. China, however, has proven to be a distinctive case. Xiaolu Kuang, Zhi Li, and Fusheng Xie probe the question of how and why China has managed to maintain its emphasis on production above finance, and the development all above the accumulation of capital.
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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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“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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New! Matthew Stanley’s “The Ragged Edge of Freedom”
The latest, from Paul Buhle: "Abolitionists and social reformers of all kinds, with a wide Yankee following augmented by many recent German immigrants, sought to take things beyond the uneasy accommodation of white populations to each other across existing political lines. In Wisconsin and in Chicago most notably, these would include “Abe’s Boys” enrolling in the army of the Union. Not so in the Southern Illinois, two hours’ drive from my hometown. The whites who immigrated northward from the near South, largely uneducated and lacking skills, came to be considered almost a species in themselves...."
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John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”
The latest: "....Epicurus for Marx was a plus because he was very critical of religion or teleology – the notion that the gods or God determined things on earth. He rejected that without rejecting religion completely. And he emphasized that the basis of human life was community, friendship; building a society based on friendship. He was the first to bring women into philosophy – allowing them to emerge as major philosophers within the Epicurean school – and also slaves. He couldn’t do anything about slavery itself, but he brought slaves into Epicurean philosophy...."
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WATCH: Socialist Register 2026
This was the first live launch of the Socialist Register in New York City, with our brand new editor, Arun Kundnani, alongside the (relatively new) coeditor of the Socialist Register, Steve Maher, joined by three contributors to this year’s volume: Ibrahim Shikaki, Costas Lapavitsas, and Paul Heideman. Together they considered these and other questions:
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