Paul Baran’s Economic Surplus Concept, the Baran Ratio, and the Decline of Feudalism
Recently published and estimated historical data illustrate that economic surplus declined during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England, helping explain the “crisis of feudalism” that started in the thirteenth century. It was not until several centuries later, when capitalism became the dominant economic system, that the economic surplus began to rise on a consistent basis, due to the reinvestment of a portion of the surplus into productive activities, a greater ratio of capital income to rental income, and a greater ratio of investment to economic surplus. | more…
Decolonization in Practice
Fundamental to Kari Marie Norgaard’s Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People is the seizure of land most evident in the overtly violent era of state-sanctioned frontier genocide and forced relocation of the Karuk. Settler colonialism, Norgaard reminds us, is an ongoing state-led project up to this day—it is not just a moment relegated to the past and, thus, the inherent treatment of Native Americans as relics of U.S. history must be challenged. | more…
The Left and the Class Struggle
Both Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge and Michael Goldfield’s The Southern Key offer ample evidence that the grand era of U.S. labor history scholarship is not yet past. The Long Deep Grudge is in equal parts labor history and family reminiscence as Gilpin seeks the fuller story of her father, who played a leadership role in the United Auto Workers union. The Southern Key is in many ways a study of a different variety, but very much of a similarly militant kind. Goldfield, a labor activist veteran himself, draws the big picture of what he sees as the central failure of the U.S. left: the failure to organize the South. | more…
November 2020 (Volume 72, Number 6)
In this issue of Monthly Review, we publish two articles marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick Engels. In the attempt to address our planet’s ecological crisis, Engels’s work has once acquired a renewed importance. His analysis of the dialectics of nature was to play a formative role in the development of modern ecological and evolutionary views and is now being rediscovered in that context. | more…
Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene
Today, two hundred years after his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. Engels’s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature’s universal metabolism. It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels’s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis. | more…
Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics
In grasping emergent qualities and laws on various levels of organization of matter, dialectical theory employs its own conceptual structure, scientific language, and investigation method, and takes a categorially open-ended shape. In this context, Engels provides a remarkable illustration that not only argues for the interconnection and interpenetration of distinct spheres such as chemistry and biology, but also draws on a generative feature of self-organizing systems. | more…
The COVID-19 Pandemic Exposes Fatal Health Inequities
As stated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, health is a fundamental human right. However, we find ourselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with a shortage of both human and material health resources, most of which must be sourced from the private sector. Some of the wealthiest countries—France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have proved unable to respond rapidly. The evolution of public health over the past four decades, during which government health policies have reduced health services to commodities and objects of speculative investment, has led to the current crisis. | more…
The Commodification of Online Cooperation
The story of the consumer’s involvement in the sphere of production is not new, as consumers have been providing unpaid labor to and otherwise subsidizing capitalism since at least the mid–twentieth century. Yet, as the economy has evolved so too have the scope and complexity of consumer work. | more…
Facing the Anthropocene: An Update
Scientific knowledge and debates in Anthropoene science have developed over the years, particularly in the two main fields involved: geology, which has mainly been concerned with formally defining the new epoch; and Earth System science, which studies the global biological, chemical, and physical changes that are reshaping the conditions of life on this planet. | more…
The Mexican and Latino Question
In his book Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, Enrique M. Buelna examines the life of Ralph Cuarón, a Mexican-American or Chicano seaman, furniture maker, father, husband, and lifelong activist who joined the Communist Party at age 19 during the Second World War. The Communist Party, however, largely ignored Mexican workers and local members were not pleased with his organizing of that segment of the working class. In the early twenty-first century, the Mexican question remained, although it became known as the “Latino question” after considerable immigration from Central America in the 1980s and ’90s. In their book The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes, and the Next Left, Armando Ibarra, Alfredo Carlos, and Rodolfo D. Torres deconstruct the word Latino, arguing that it homogenizes an extremely diverse population. | more…
October 2020 (Volume 72, Number 5)
This special issue of Monthly Review, “China 2020,” is the product of a long period of cooperation with critical Chinese Marxist scholars. This has resulted in an extensive series of articles on contemporary Chinese social and economic relations since 2012, to which most of the authors in the present issue have previously contributed. It takes on a special significance due to the growing conflict between the United States and China, making critical Marxist analysis in this area all the more important. | more…
Popular
- Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein
- Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball
- Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene by John Bellamy Foster
- Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism by Charisse Burden-Stelly
- China 2020: An Introduction by John Bellamy Foster
- Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 by Rob Wallace
- Marx on Gender and the Family: A Summary by Heather Brown
- Capitalism and Mental Health by David Matthews
- October 2020 (Volume 72, Number 5) by The Editors
- The Contagion of Capital by John Bellamy Foster
MR Online
- The class composition of the Capitol rioters (First Cut) January 20, 2021 Eds.
- Capitalism and the Telos of the Neoliberal Civilizing Mission January 20, 2021 Eds.
- The patriots January 20, 2021 Prabhat Patnaik
- U.S. makes aggressive opening move on Russian chessboard January 20, 2021 M.K. Bhadrakumar
- In memory of Patrice Lumumba, assassinated on January 17, 1961 January 19, 2021 Éric Toussaint
- Max Blumenthal: Breach of Capitol security was like a military operation January 19, 2021 Max Blumenthal
- The Jewish supremacist state (A comment on B’Tselem’s ‘apartheid regime’ designation for Israel) January 19, 2021 Norman G. Finkelstein
- Citing famine, UN urges reversal of terrorist designation for Yemen’s Houthis; U.S. refuses January 19, 2021 Peoples Dispatch
- COVID-19: How the world fought in 2020 January 18, 2021 Eds.
- Illicit Financial Flows: Africa is the world’s main creditor January 18, 2021 Eds.
Climate & Capitalism
- Ecosocialist Bookshelf, Jan. 2021 January 20, 2021
- Bidenfreude: Covid-19 in Post-Trump U.S. January 16, 2021
- Upper Ocean Temperatures Set a New High Record in 2020 January 14, 2021
- Amber Waves: A Biography of Wheat January 13, 2021
- Capitalism and Catastrophe January 12, 2021
- Record number of billion-dollar disasters struck U.S. in 2020 January 8, 2021
- Ecosystem Destruction Fueled the Pandemic. Pollution Makes It Worse. January 4, 2021
- New Challenges in South Africa’s Fight for Climate Justice January 1, 2021
- Ecosocialist Bookshelf, December 2020 December 16, 2020
- Ecosocialism: A Vital Synthesis December 16, 2020
Michael Yates: Economist’s Travelogue
- What we sow is what we eat September 21, 2017
- A Land Grant in Maine: The Gift That’s Been Giving Since 1767 September 6, 2016
- Let’s Get Serious About Inequality and Socialism May 7, 2016
- Bernie Sanders’ “Political Revolution” February 29, 2016
- Geraldine July 7, 2015
- Dreaming of the Dead January 23, 2015
- Those Who Came Before Us* January 5, 2015
- Dolphins at the Hilton November 24, 2014
- Order-Givers and Order-Takers* October 27, 2014
- Sacco and Vanzetti* August 23, 2014