April 1, 2025
John Bellamy Foster revisits and critiques the contention that the U.S. capitalist class is not a “governing” class, or indeed a class-conscious bloc in any sense. However, he writes, the fact that the ruling-class oligarchy is now openly wielding power on the national and international stages as part of the Trump regime shows that the overwhelming political influence of the capitalist class is no longer in dispute as this alignment pushes the country deeper into neofascism.
April 1, 2025
This article will be released in full online April 7, 2025.
What is ecological civilization? In this article, Chen Yiwen presents a dialectical analysis that illuminates the theoretical and practical elements of ecological civilization, particularly as it develops in the context of China. In China, she notes, significant progress has been made, but there remain outstanding questions that must be resolved during the transition to an ecologically harmonious society that promotes global equality and human flourishing.
April 1, 2025
This article will be released in full online April 14, 2025.
Yumeng Liu takes a deep dive into the history of Laos, the only socialist nation among the Theravāda Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, examining how the country has developed its own particular approach to socialism, influenced by both local Buddhist beliefs and Marxist ideology. Liu also explores the historical and present-day tensions inherent in this uniquely Lao approach to socialist development.
March 1, 2025
John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill assess the history and influence of Western Marxism, defined not geographically, but by a rejection of the Marxism developed in the Soviet Union, in the Global South, and even in classical Marxism. This strain of Marxist thought, birthed in the imperial core, represents a concession to the dominance of U.S. ideology, rather than to correct the pressing issues confronting society today.
March 1, 2025
In this excerpt from Ellen Meiksins Wood’s In Defense of History, Wood appraises the state of postmodern thought in the late twentieth century. “Today’s postmodernism,” Wood writes, “for all of its apparently defeatist pessimism, is still rooted in the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism.’ It’s time to leave that legacy behind and face today’s realities.”
March 1, 2025
Torkil Lauesen delves into the legacy of celebrated Arghiri Emmanuel, whose theory of unequal exchange resonates well into the twenty-first century. Introduced in 1962, Emmanuel’s critique of Ricardian and neoliberal capitalism further illuminated the Marxist concept value as it relates to global exchange and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North.
March 1, 2025
Using data from Brazil’s Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexity of unstable labor dynamics in a world of informal and precarious work.
March 1, 2025
A new poem by Marge Piercy.
February 1, 2025
The editors recall the life and accomplishments of Amiya Kumar Bagchi, a leading light among contemporary Marxist political economists. Bagchi’s insights challenged prevailing Eurocentric ideas about economic history while providing a path forward through a collective, united, anti-imperialist resistance.