In order to understand the crisis of the imperialist world system in the twenty-first century,” MR editors write in this month’s “Notes from the Editors,” “it is crucial to see this in terms of the present as history, that is, as an outgrowth of a centuries-long historical process.” Following this thread from the long sixteenth century through to the present day, the editors dissect the material conditions leading the emergence to a new and decidedly anti-imperialist revolutionary subject. | more…
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…
This article will be released in full online September 8, 2025.
In this interview, published here for the first time in English, Abdaljawad Omar (aka Abboud Hamayel) and Pascual Liguori discuss Western media attempts to force upon Palestinians narratives of either victimhood or savagery. These portrayals, however, only obscure the threat Palestinian resistance poses not just to Zionism, but to the colonial project globally. | more…
This article will be released in full online September 15, 2025.
In 2003, Haitian president Jean-Betrand Aristide publicly called for France to pay reparations to Haiti—and less than a year later, was whisked away from the island via U.S. military aircraft. Steve Cushion sheds light on the colonial and neocolonial relationships that have imposed crushing debt on Haiti and its people, and their continuing implications for Haiti’s development. | more…
Chris Gilbert proposes to answer the question: When is a socialist commune anti-imperialist? His response follows Karl Marx’s line of thought, looking at the latter’s approach to the commune from the Grundrisse through his late notes and letters on rural communes. After reconstructing the Marxist communal strategy, Gilbert argues that real-world projects in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil in recent times conform to this overall Marxist approach, combining communal construction with an anti-imperialist drive for national liberation. | more…
“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…
This month, the editors dive into the history of Nazi Germany for a discussion of Gleichschaltung, which in this instance describes the “falling into line” of institutions and individuals under fascism. As the editors point out, the extralegal and norm-breaking actions may be justified rhetorically by the fascist regime but require the acquiescence of the larger society in order to become effective—a process we are currently watching in real time. | more…
In this third installment of MR‘s series on the MAGA movement, John Bellamy Foster explores the dramatic shift in U.S. imperialism that began with the first Trump presidency and has accelerated in his second. The shift, Foster explains, is not one driven by anti-imperialism and anti-militarism but rather represents a hard shift to the right fueled by hypernationalism and the goal of recapturing U.S. power on the world stage. | more…
Thomas Palley identifies and illuminates both the internal and external drivers of the war in Ukraine. Through this article, he explores how the breakup of the Soviet Union, the aggressive expansion of NATO, U.S. neoconservative geopolitics, present-day Ukraine’s domestic tensions, and other factors led to the current conflict, in which the only winner seems to be the United States. | more…
Pranay Somayajula dives deep into how the idea of decolonization has taken hold both theoretically and practically, showing how its deployment by the fascist Hindutva movement to justify anti-Muslim oppression reveals a latent threat: potential cooptation by actors seeking to promote nationalist identities in postcolonial contexts. Somayajula concludes that what is needed is a “return to a materially grounded understanding of empire and resistance,” adding that “Any version of decolonization…placing a greater importance than the abstract than the material is a ‘decolonization’ that has lost its way.” | more…
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 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…
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