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Chart 7. Share of Surplus Profits (as Percent of Total Profit)

Power, Control, Inequality, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

Jayati Ghosh illuminates how capitalism has exacerbated inequality not only due to market forces, but as a result of how wealthy countries and firms based within them have tilted the scales toward themselves, disenfranchising the rest of the world in the process. This pervasive economic inequality, Ghosh concludes, undermines the idea and practice of true democracy. | more…

Image 1. Curutú Household, Late 18th Century

Popular Power in Brazil: What Can We Learn from Indigenous, African, and Peasant Histories of Collective Resistance?

“To tell the history of resistance,” Roberta Traspadini writes, “we need to investigate the territories where people live their daily lives.” Using both historical analysis and contemporary data, Roberta Traspadini reveals the importance of Brazilian Quilombola communities as local sites of struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. These quilombagem, she argues, reveal the revolutionary legacy that persists among the most marginalized in Brazilian society. | more…

Blister packs of pills

Big Pharma and Monopoly Capital: Four Dynamics in the Decline of Innovation

In an age of cutting-edge medical science, how do the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies stifle innovation in order to juice profits and remain competitive in the international markets? The answer, Jia Liu writes, can be found in the concept of monopoly capitalism. This brand of “intellectual monopoly capitalism,” she notes, contributes to “a logic of expropriation and rent-seeking,” leading in turn to “closed science and declining medical innovation.” | more…

“The Bosses of the Senate” by Joseph Keppler

The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

John Bellamy Foster presents a rogue’s gallery of the fascist ideologues insidiously pushing the MAGA agenda, from the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 to neo-Nazi YouTubers and cultural influencers. “The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement,” Foster writes, “were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically.” | more…

Robert W. McChesney

Neoliberalism and Neofascism

As we mourn the loss of prolific MR author and media advocate Robert W. McChesney, we are grateful to be able to publish an excerpt from his introduction to John Bellamy Foster’s Trump in the White House (Monthly Review Press, 2017). In this insightful analysis, McChesney explains how neoliberal restructuring prepared paved the way for Trump and the neofascist MAGA movement to reach the dizzying heights of power that they have reached today. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 76, Number 11 (April 2025)

April 2025 (Volume 76, Number 11)

This month, MR editors take on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a pale imitation of the five authentic Nobel Prizes that is aimed at reinforcing the ideology of neoclassical economics and awarded to mainstream liberal economists who defend the institutions of capitalism. In line with this tradition, the editors note, the most recent winners are keen apologists for settler colonialism and Zionism. | more…

Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce

The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime

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. | more…

The Danger of Fascism in the United States: A View from the 1950s

“The Big Business-military coalition in the United States,” Paul A. Baran wrote in this prescient reprise from 1952, “assumes all of the functions of a fascist regime…. And it develops rapidly into its own American variety of government under capitalism in an age of imperialism, wars, and national and social revolutions. It becomes fully adapted to its sinister historical mission—to be the instrument of ruthless class struggle on the national and international planes.” | more…

Arghiri Emmanuel

Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance

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. | more…

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Braverman, Monopoly Capital, and AI: The Collective Worker and the Reunification of Labor

December’s Monthly Review begins the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Harry Braverman’s seminal work, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974), with this Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster, which explores the connections between Marx’s “collective worker,” Braverman’s “collective scientist,” and the struggle against the degradation of work in the digital age. | more…

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