June 1, 2026
June's "Notes from the Editors" revisits the fundamental concept of monopoly capitalism as expounded by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy in their pathbreaking
Monopoly Capital. The recent resurgence of the debate around Baran and Sweezy's work, the editors write, misses not only the enduring relevance of their analysis in an era of megacorporations and hyperscalers, but the revolutionary understanding of the economic system that arises from such an analysis.
June 1, 2026
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.
May 1, 2026
John Bellamy Foster takes on sweeping questions of artificial intelligence and its role in today's capitalist society. "The Great Houses of AI are divided against themselves and cannot stand," he writes, "If humanity is to flourish, the forces and relations of production must be revolutionized together…creating a world of sustainable human development."
April 1, 2026
While the "world is rapidly approaching tipping points that spell irreversible and catastrophic climate change," write The Editors, "we are not seeing the necessary turn from ecological reform to ecological revolution, but rather the rise of ecological reaction.… An absolute no-quarters war from above is now being waged against all political attempts to address climate change." This attack is epitomized by "the Donald Trump administration's goal of removing the 2009 Endangerment Finding of the Clean Air Act that underlies all national climate legislation in the United States." While this tactic is unlikely to succeed, the proliferation of similar attacks clearly demonstrate that "[m]onopoly-finance capital has now abandoned the energy transition, which was its only answer to climate change."
March 1, 2026
"To make sense of present developments,"
MR editors write in this month's "Notes from the Editors," "it is essential to understand the dialectic of continuity and change in U.S. imperial grand strategy." By charting the evolution from post-Second World War dominance to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eventual demise of the "Unipolar Moment," the Editors tie the reactionary impulses of MAGA to the raw shows of imperial force driven by Trump's policies.
March 1, 2026
Vijay Prashad critiques the argument that colonialism was, at most, ancillary to the transition between capitalism and feudalism in Western Europe. Instead, Prashad argues, "capitalism
as it historically emerged—industrial, global, racialized, and imperial—was inseparable from colonial expropriation." This reality must fuel a Marxist conception of the global struggle for reparations for those who have been oppressed and exploited at the hands of empires past and present.
February 1, 2026
Using historical databases and quantitative analysis, Thomas E. Lambert calls into question the assertion that the trans-Atlantic slave trade can be considered a separate phenomenon from, rather than a major supporting factor in, the Industrial Revolution in England. Asserting otherwise, he writes, is a to deny "a horrifying and inhuman part of the global history of capitalism."
January 1, 2026
David E. Perlman and Ashly Vigneault explore the linkages between humanity's metabolic rift with nature and the accelerating emergence of epidemics, which are fundamentally related to the capitalist mode of production and concomitant alienated social metabolism. Using historical and epidemiological research that extends from the rise of the bubonic plague to the emergence of COVID-19, Perlman and Vigneault are able to deftly tie these concepts to the breach of planetary boundaries that threatens all of humanity.
January 1, 2026
Mateo Crossa delineates the history of U.S. imperialism in Mexico through the lens of its domination of the fossil fuel industry, particularly by way of the Shale Revolution and the advent of fracking. "By engineering new regional dependencies and reshaping energy alliances to suit is strategic ambitions," Crossa writes, "the United States weaponized its command over natural gas to deepen its grip on the global fossil energy system and reinforce its imperial reach."
December 1, 2025
Matthew Rothschild looks back on nearly 40 years working alongside his friend and colleague Robert W. McChesney. McChesney, he writes, brought to the world a sharp analysis of not only the contradiction between corporate media and democracy, but between the capitalist system as a whole and a true democracy that serves the people.
