September 1, 2018
Throughout China's nearly seventy-year history of industrialization and financialization, whenever the cost of an economic crisis could be transferred to the rural sector, capital-intensive urban industries have had a "soft landing" and existing institutional arrangements have been maintained—a pattern that continues today. We argue that Chinese peasants and rural communities have rescued the country from no fewer than ten such economic crises.
July 1, 2018
In recent years ecological critiques of capitalism have deepened and multiplied, resulting in new debates over the conception, scope, and purpose of Marx's value theory and its relation to the natural world.
June 1, 2018
With the eruption in March of the scandal around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, articles raising the alarm on "surveillance capitalism" are suddenly everywhere. The term, which was coined in MR in August of 2014, was developed to highlight the links between digital spying systems and contemporary capitalism as a whole. Academic interpretations of the concept effectively divorced surveillance capitalism from class analysis, and from the overall political-economic structure of capitalism—as if surveillance could be abstracted from monopoly-finance capital as a whole.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
