October 1, 2023
What is the state of health care in China? Wei Zhang analyzes the deep institutional issues that plague China's health care system. Despite its timely and effective efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis, the system still faces deep-seated challenges, many of which can be traced directly to the marketization of hospitals and medical care.
October 1, 2023
There is a growing sense in China, Alex Witherspoon, Amir Khan, and Yu Zhou write, that the timeworn methods of social advancement are yielding diminishing returns. Using an original survey of 301 individuals in Jingzhou City, the authors lay bare the roots of this widespread feeling of involution.
October 1, 2023
Matteo Crossa reveals the true nature of unequal value transfer from Mexico to the United States. Going beyond a simple tally of wages lost versus remittances, Crossa's research demonstrates the true magnitude of the value stolen from Mexico, negating the claim that its manufacturing sector is a boon to the Mexican working class.
September 1, 2023
Humanity in this moment faces two major crises: one ecological, growing more acute with every planetary boundary passed; the other social, leading to deprivation and despair across the globe. An effective ecosocialist approach to these crises, Jason Hickel writes, must aim to resolve both in a single stroke.
September 1, 2023
"How is it," Helena Sheehan asks, "that classical Marxist authors were able to address such a stunning array of issues"? The answer can be found, she writes, is in the totality of their intellectual efforts: "Marxism is the only intellectual tradition on the scene capable of embracing…what needs to be comprehended to understand and cope with our world."
July 1, 2023
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Engels foresaw that without disarmament, Europe would soon be plunged into war. Modern weaponry has made the question of disarmament even more urgent. In this month's "Notes from the Editors," the editors put forward the objectives for a contemporary socialist disarmament strategy.
July 1, 2023
Chris Gilbert examines the ecological aspects of Venezuela's project of communal socialism, as well as its relation to the country's inherited extractive economy. These democratically run communities present an alternative to the extractivist and productivist social relations driving the planet to ruin.
July 1, 2023
As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth.
July 1, 2023
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx's understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. "Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology," he writes, "planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality."
July 1, 2023
Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. "So how," Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, "might planning beyond growth look?" It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world.
