November 1, 2025
It is a commonplace that the world in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is facing multiple, multifaceted crises, threatening all world civilization and the future of humanity itself. So omnipresent is the contemporary world disorder that received ideology has settled on a single word to describe it: “polycrisis.” Anyone who wants to know what polycrisis is and where it comes from will inevitably run up against a blank wall. For the establishment, the vacuousness of the concept of polycrisis is its primary value.
November 1, 2025
In Aeschylus’s play
Prometheus Bound, the Prometheus is a revolutionary figure. Defying divine interdiction to bring fire to humanity, the Titan has since been adopted by thinkers from the Enlightenment to today to represent revolutionary forces in human existence. So, John Bellamy Foster asks in November’s Review of the Month, what is “Prometheanism,” and how has the term been used (and misused) in discussions of Marx, the ecological crisis, and sustainable human development?
November 1, 2025
In this far-reaching analysis, Vijay Prashad enumerates the conditions of the current conjuncture that, despite seemingly intractable capitalist and imperialist hegemony, point to a reinvigorated revolutionary consciousness among the global population. In a world of capitalist degradation, Prashad declares: "A politics to produce dignity is a socialist politics…. Capitalism inherently generates forms of inequality and indignity. Therefore, all undertakings that seek dignity for all are socialist projects."
October 1, 2025
In this month's "Note from the Editors,"
MR editors detail importance of understanding the world's grossly unequal carbon emissions output in terms of class while also recognizing the role of imperialism at the center of the crisis. "The rapidly worsening climate conditions threatening the world population," they write, "can thus be seen as a product of the ongoing
class war perpetuated by the 'billionaire class' against working people everywhere."
October 1, 2025
In this interview with Xu Tao and Lv Jiayi, John Bellamy Foster discuss the history and present of ecological Marxism. Foster explores origins of the term
Anthropocene and its predecessors, the concept of degrowth, the continuing influence of metabolic rift theory, and the cutting-edge issues facing young scholars of degrowth today.
October 1, 2025
Ian Angus illuminates the politics behind the decision by the International Union of Geological Sciences not to recognize the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch. In recounting the debate, Angus explores how the organization undermined the conclusions of top scientists to oppose the establishment of the Anthropocene, and its implications for the public debate about the planetary crisis.
September 1, 2025
Jayati Ghosh illuminates how capitalism has exacerbated inequality not only due to market forces, but as a result of how wealthy countries and firms based within them have tilted the scales toward themselves, disenfranchising the rest of the world in the process. This pervasive economic inequality, Ghosh concludes, undermines the idea and practice of true democracy.
July 1, 2025
"To tell the history of resistance," Roberta Traspadini writes, "we need to investigate the territories where people live their daily lives." Using both historical analysis and contemporary data, Roberta Traspadini reveals the importance of Brazilian Quilombola communities as local sites of struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. These quilombagem, she argues, reveal the revolutionary legacy that persists among the most marginalized in Brazilian society.
June 1, 2025
In an age of cutting-edge medical science, how do the world's largest pharmaceutical companies stifle innovation in order to juice profits and remain competitive in the international markets? The answer, Jia Liu writes, can be found in the concept of monopoly capitalism. This brand of "intellectual monopoly capitalism," she notes, contributes to "a logic of expropriation and rent-seeking," leading in turn to "closed science and declining medical innovation."
May 1, 2025
John Bellamy Foster presents a rogue's gallery of the fascist ideologues insidiously pushing the MAGA agenda, from the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 to neo-Nazi YouTubers and cultural influencers. "The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement," Foster writes, "were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically."