June 1, 2018
Three hundred years after what became known in the nineteenth century as the Great Game—a struggle for regional hegemony between the British and Russian Empires—Southwest Asia remains an imperial staging ground. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 signaled Washington's desire to cement its hegemonic position, but seventeen years later it is mired in an unwinnable war, even as the U.S. economy—and that of much of the Western world—endures the "endless crisis" of contemporary capitalism.
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April 1, 2018
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans and Native Americans were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas. This story of slavery, colonialism, and emerging capitalism—and their handmaiden, white supremacy—is integral to that of modernity itself.
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April 1, 2018
From call centers to fast-food restaurants, the future of service work is one of precarious employment, with no stable schedules, wages, benefits, or union representation. Should these workers be considered part of a new service proletariat, or treated as a new class altogether, the "precariat"?
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April 1, 2018
The Marxian critique of political economy is inseparable from the "labor theory of value." But what exactly does this theory mean? This article considers Marx's value theory from five perspectives: as a monetary value theory, a theory of exploitation, a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production, a theory of individual prices, and a theory of crises.
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April 1, 2018
For several decades, intellectuals and economists who follow Marxist theory have hotly debated the financialization of capitalism. François Chesnais's latest book represents the most thorough and polished attempt yet to clarify several lingering questions around the matter.
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March 1, 2018
The pharmaceutical industry has been enormously profitable for many decades. The myth is that these windfalls are warranted by the therapeutic advances made by pharmaceutical companies—but the reality is far different.
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February 1, 2018
A recent article by the economist Riccardo Bellofiore includes a significant treatment of Paul Sweezy's dynamic theory of monopoly capital. But the essay's most noteworthy contributions, in our view, relate to Harry Magdoff and Sweezy's role in the 1970s and '80s in developing a theory of financialization, and what their analysis can tell us about our current situation.
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February 1, 2018
The most important principle of the monopoly capital tradition is that of "the present as history"—a focus on the historical specificity that separates the various modes, stages, and phases of production and accumulation, and its application to our understanding of the present.
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January 1, 2018
The recent rise of social reproduction theory represents one of the most remarkable attempts to extend historical materialism in our time. The Review of the Month in this issue, "Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution," is intended as a contribution to this rapidly growing body of work.
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January 1, 2018
"Monopoly capital" is a term for the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that in the late nineteenth century began to displace the small family firm as the dominant economic unit, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism.
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