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…
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…
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…
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…
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“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…
The editors analyze recent shift in mainstream discourse away from the goal of energy transition toward capitalist friendly policies that allow corporations to receive large subsidies for inadequate “solutions.” Despite the scientific consensus that these are insufficient to tackle the planetary crisis, capital and its advocates continue to promote the abandonment of the energy transition in the effort to maintain U.S. imperial dominance and feed its hunger for fossil fuels. | more…
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…
Using data from Brazil’s Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexity of unstable labor dynamics in a world of informal and precarious work. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China’s successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, “represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony.” | more…
Craig Medlen draws on decades of data to reveal how the creeping stagnation of the past half-century has led to the increasing consolidation of corporate monopoly power and concentration of firms by way of mergers and, importantly, the free cash that funds them. This stunning rise in free cash, fueled in part by government deficits, starkly reveals how the ruling class continues to enrich themselves and strengthen their position on the top of the economic heap. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…