July 1, 2026
John Bellamy Foster introduces our special summer issue on the "Structural Crisis of Capital," illuminating its four main characteristics as first outlined by István Mészáros in
Marx's Theory of Alienation. Capital, Foster says, has found itself in a position akin to Lucian's sorcerer's apprentice: futilely attempting to control a runaway system that he had himself created, accumulating not only contradictions but outright catastrophe—with globe-spanning consequences.
July 1, 2026
"Old-style neoliberalism," write Riccardo Bellofiore and Giovanna Vertova "is dead, or at least gravely ill. The new paradigm that may replace it has not yet been born or is not yet recognizable. In the middle, between the times, lies what we have proposed to call the
permanent catastrophe: a regime in which capitalist responses in catastrophic form have become the norm, in which crises are no longer overcome but accumulate."
July 1, 2026
It is quite evident, Costas Lapavitsas begins, that the world is currently ensnared in geopolitical turmoil, perhaps for over a decade. In this article, Lapavitsas provides insight into the inseparable and interlocking mechanisms of dollar dominance and imperialism backed by the escalatory militarism of the second Trump administration. As Lapavitsas notes: "The dollar and the F-35—monetary coercion and military power—are two moments of a single structure of domination."
July 1, 2026
Jan Toporowski explains our contemporary age of "monetary policy dominance": the era in which the setting of short-term interest rates by the central banks is seen as the key instrument for regulating economic activity. This, however, does not reflect an ironclad law of the business cycle but, rather, a set of assumptions that underscores the dependence of capitalism on the accumulation of capital itself. This in turn obscures deeper truths about the effectiveness of monetary policy on the daily lives of the working class.
July 1, 2026
Over the last half-century, the "financial explosion"—manifest in the unrestrained expansion of financialization and its tools and institutions—has fundamentally reshaped the global economy, impacting countries throughout the Global North and South. China, however, has proven to be a distinctive case. Xiaolu Kuang, Zhi Li, and Fusheng Xie probe the question of how and why China has managed to maintain its emphasis on production above finance, and the development all above the accumulation of capital.
July 1, 2026
Since the wane of mercantilism in Europe, conceptions of wealth, trade, and productivity have also changed: from one of a zero-sum game reliant only on the productivity of land, to one of the potential for positive-sum wealth created by industry, and, now, to the zero-sum neomercantilism necessitated in a world of resource depletion, where the earth is pushed to its biophysical limits. But the response to this crisis does not have to be further fortification—it could also be a world that organizes itself within the metabolic limitations of nature.
July 1, 2026
In order to comprehend the environmental crisis that goes hand-in-hand with the "Structural Crisis of Capital," we must also understand the nature of global value chains and how they contribute to environmental degradation and worker exploitation on a global level. Benjamin Selwyn elucidates how global value chains and digitalization sit within a "conjoined dynamic of labor-exploitative accumulation and ecological expropriation."
July 1, 2026
Martin Hart-Landsberg gives an in-depth account of the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and their embrace of transhumanist ideologies that celebrate individualism and technological advancement above all else. However, he asserts, all is not lost, as growing dissatisfaction with capitalism "is slowly but steadily helping to grow a movement of resistance"—a resistance that must recognize that it is not just tech billionaires but capitalism itself threatening humanity's chance at a better future.
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.
