Christian Noakes invites readers into a literary exploration of Franz Kafka’s short story, “Josephine the Singer.” After all, as the author notes, “Kafka’s often nightmarish stories reflect many of the social, political, and cultural dynamics inherent under capitalism.” In applying this notion to “Josephine the Singer,” Noakes discovers a tale that describes not only the mechanisms of domination that constrain us, but the possibilities of a new consciousness, and a new world. | more…
This article will be released in full online November 25, 2023.
In this review of Bit Tyrants by Rob Larson, Mateo Crossa finds and expands on how the powerful actors of Silicon Valley have fashioned themselves into the new, unapologetic robber barons, operating in the shadows of political lobbying to maintain their monopolistic practices in the Global North while shamelessly engaging in the naked exploitation of the workers in the Global South. Crossa echoes Larson’s call for liberation from these tyrants, bringing attention to the necessity of socialism—both on- and offline—to agitate for democratic control over the technology and Internet platforms that increasingly penetrate our daily lives. | more…
Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei look to the Chinese and U.S. economies to illustrate the contradictions of secular stagnation, concluding that both economies will likely face great challenges in the decades to come. However, they write, progressive economic policies could change China’s future, encouraging massive investment into the state sector and bringing about the transition to a fully socialist society. | more…
Since the 1980s, Chinese writers and thinkers have been engaging with Marxist ecology, constructing a theoretical system that starts with interpretation of Marx and Engels themselves. Chen Yiwen takes stock of how this framework progressed toward an overarching theory of ecological civilization, generating new questions to be answered at every stage of development. | more…
Bernard D’Mello describes India’s role as a collaborator in the U.S. anti-China Indo-Pacific project. This role, he elaborates, grows directly from the imperial/sub-imperial relationship between the United States and India, which manifests itself in border disputes, military exercises, diplomacy, economic ties, and more, has heightened hostilities in the Indo-Pacific region while benefiting the power elite of both countries. | more…
Sylvia Martin reveals the deep linkages between U.S. universities and the military-industrial complex through the Department of Defense’s University Affiliated Research Centers. These programs utilize colleges and universities as research and development labs for the U.S. imperial war machine, blurring the lines between ostensibly independent institutions and the military academy and enabling the further expansion and normalization of the warmaking apparatus throughout U.S. society. | more…
In this reprise from 1992, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy look toward the end of the recession then plaguing the United States, seeing choice looming on the horizon: Will the progressive left attempt to reform capitalism, or replace it entirely? Capital’s inexorable thirst for growth beyond natural limits, they write, means we must choose the latter—”if we care about the future of the human species…we had better listen to the ecologists.” | more…
Reviewing Smitha Radhakrishnan’s Making Women Pay, Jingyi Zhang elucidates the exploitative practices of the much-vaunted microfinance industry, particularly as they apply to—and exacerbate—existing tensions within communities of women in India. | more…
Knowledge as Commons traces the historical path towards the privatization of knowledge, situating science, technology and the emergence of modern nations in a larger historical framework. Author Prabir Purkayastha asks: Do the needs of society drive science and technology? Or do developments in science and technology provide the motor force of history? Has this relationship changed over time? Purkayastha shows us that, with profit as its sole aim, capital claims to own human knowledge and its products, fencing them in with patents and intellectual property rights. Neoliberal institutions and policy diktats from the West have installed a global system in which knowledge, that limitless resource,
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark introduce this summer’s special issue on “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” exploring how the super-region came to be conceptualized among geopolitical strategists and its present-day role in U.S military strategy. “The United States,” they write, “facing the demise of its global hegemonic imperialism, is not only preparing for a Third World War; it is actively provoking it.” | more…
In this month’s “Notes from the Editors,” MR editors confront the Tower of Babel that has emerged over Marx’s early “Prometheanism” and later “degrowth communism.” This ahistorical interpretation has engendered further critique of ecosocialism and degrowth on the part of self-identified productivist writers, who attempt incorrectly to paint degrowth as a Malthusian project, rather than a realistic effort to live within Earth’s planetary capacities. | more…
Originally published in the German journal Widerspruch, Arman Spéth interviews John Bellamy Foster about the growing interest in degrowth thought and the importance of incorporating democratic planning aimed at true equality into all levels of society. And what of the ecosocialist revolution? “Opportunities,” Foster says, “are everywhere. Obstacles, largely a product of the present system, are also everywhere.… Nothing can or will remain the same. That is the very definition of a revolutionary situation.” | more…
