April 1, 2025
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.
January 1, 2025
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.
January 1, 2025
In this interview with Claudia Antunes of Brazilian magazine Sumaúma, Ian Angus takes stock of our current planetary crisis, from its origins in Marx’s ecological thought and the present debate over its designation to the future of human civilization as we know it. “The key question is,” he concludes, “Are we going to see large number of people moving for change?”
December 1, 2024
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.
December 1, 2024
What was the impact of Labor and Monopoly Capital in its day, and what is its resonance in ours? Kuang Xiaolu, Li Zhi, and Xie Fusheng take stock of Harry Braverman’s influential scholarship over the last half-century. In sum, they write, “with the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the significance of Labor and Monopoly Capital has long surpassed narrow national boundaries and the era in which Braverman lived.”
December 1, 2024
Following Harry Braverman’s assertion that we must examine “by way of concrete historical specific analysis of technology…on one side and social relations on the other” in order to understand the impact of the Scientific-Technical Revolution on our daily lives, John Hedlund and Stefano B. Longo describe the explosion of the Synthetic Age of plastics, revealing the commodification of science in service of capital.
December 1, 2024
John Bellamy Foster returns to his impactful Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000), for this new introduction for the recent German translation of the book (Marx’ Ökologie, Edition Assemblage, 2024). “There is no longer any question,” he concludes, “about the depth of Marx’s metabolic critique…or its centrality in terms of the philosophy of praxis in our day.”
December 1, 2024
Mark Allison reviews Brian Merchant’s timely Blood in the Machine (Little, Brown, and Co., 2023), finding in it a compelling historical account of the original Luddite movement with important parallels to our own age of Big Tech. However, Allison asks, are the lessons drawn from Blood in the Machine even possible within the confines of capitalism?
November 1, 2024
Monthly Review editors elucidate Samir Amin’s concept of “delinking” in the context of the rise of global multipolarity. Delinking, they write, does not aim to isolate individual nations and populations economically, “but rather finding a way to sever connections with the main mechanisms of imperial dominance.”
November 1, 2024
John Bellamy Foster returns to the touchstones of anti-imperialist Marxist thought, found in the works of V. I. Lenin, Samir Amin, and others, in order to confront the rising denial of imperialism on the left. This worldview and its consequences, he writes, has troubling implications not only for the superexploited workers of the periphery, but for all of the workers of the world, and for the internationalist character of contemporary Marxism.
