The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. | more…
Capital, Ben Selwyn writes, has been advancing its interests under the guise of protecting “global supply chain resilience.” While those promoting the resilience agenda assert that these supply chains represent a net benefit, evidence suggests that they increase the transfer of surplus value from the Global North and, especially, in the. South. | more…
In this reprise from October 1993, Henry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ask: “Isn’t there anyone around here who understands how this capitalist system works?” | more…
Martin Hart-Landsberg revisits the history of the industrial re-organization of the U.S. economy during the Second World War. What can we learn from our past about the systemic changes necessary to face our future? | more…
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” marks the 30-year anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The abject failure of this framework to enact meaningful progress on the planetary crisis continued to be on full display in 2022, including at November’s COP27 in Egypt. | more…
Pyotr Kondrashov takes a deep dive into Lenin’s understanding of social dialectics. This exploration gives rise to an approach to that places the active human subject squarely in the center of a revolutionary Marxism that goes “beyond Marx,” furthering the struggle for a liberated society. | more…
How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution brings us to the heart of one of the most precarious and transformational moments in Cuba’s evolution. As the Soviet Union fell to pieces in the 1990s, Cuba managed to evade the fate of its primary trading ally. How was this possible, especially as Cuba endured relentless attacks from the capitalist behemoth directly to its north? | more…
The crypto winter, Ramaa Vasudevan writes, is here. Cryptocurrency, far from being a democratizing force in finance, has led to only further concentrations of wealth and power and increased precarity within the financial sector. The recent fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is only the beginning. | more…
Arianto Sangadji traces the relationship between the state and mining capital in Indonesia throughout the historical capitalist development of the country from Dutch colonialism to the contemporary practices of multinational mining corporations. While these powerful firms have generated significant profits, they are also associated with dispossession, environmental degradation, and ruthless labor exploitation, spurring resistance from the local populations. | more…
The perception that we are living in a critical historical period regarding the conditions of habitability on Earth—not only for humans but for many other living organisms too—is gaining more and more adepts among common people, academics, politicians, and social movements. This critical period has been typified as the planetary crisis of the Anthropocene Epoch and studies undertaken in the present century show that habitability on Earth is progressively deteriorating. | more…
In this reprint of the February 1994 “Notes from the Editors,” former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: “The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?” | more…