With the eruption in March of the scandal around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, articles raising the alarm on “surveillance capitalism” are suddenly everywhere. The term, which was coined in MR in August of 2014, was developed to highlight the links between digital spying systems and contemporary capitalism as a whole. Academic interpretations of the concept effectively divorced surveillance capitalism from class analysis, and from the overall political-economic structure of capitalism—as if surveillance could be abstracted from monopoly-finance capital as a whole. | more…
The neoliberal restructuring of U.S. higher education is widely recognized, but nonetheless treated superficially and piecemeal in most left analyses, with little critical understanding of its inner political-economic logic. It is here that American observers have the most to learn from their British counterparts. | more…
Building on Marx’s own open-ended critique, three revolutionary new developments have recently arisen in Marxist theory, addressing social reproduction, the expropriation of nature, and racial capitalism. | more…
Nuclear weapons have been used again and again—most often by the United States—as threats directed at various nation-states to achieve geopolitical ends. Each such use takes us closer to the precipice of all-out nuclear war. | more…
A recent article by the economist Riccardo Bellofiore includes a significant treatment of Paul Sweezy’s dynamic theory of monopoly capital. But the essay’s most noteworthy contributions, in our view, relate to Harry Magdoff and Sweezy’s role in the 1970s and ’80s in developing a theory of financialization, and what their analysis can tell us about our current situation. | more…
The recent rise of social reproduction theory represents one of the most remarkable attempts to extend historical materialism in our time. The Review of the Month in this issue, “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” is intended as a contribution to this rapidly growing body of work. | more…
István Mészáros, who died on October 1 at the age of eighty-six, was a leading Marxist theorist and a frequent contributor to MR. No political philosopher of our age has reached nearly so far in joining philosophy with political-economic critique, or in systematically addressing the question of the movement toward socialism. | more…
The groups fighting white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere represent a cross-section of the U.S. left, from socialists to communists to anarchists. Together, they affirm that to combat the new right-wing resurgence, it is necessary to combat capitalism itself. | more…
For this special issue, MR has invited some of the most profound left thinkers in the world to reflect on the legacy of revolutions and counterrevolutions around the world since 1917. Naturally, these authors do not all offer similar perspectives or come to the same conclusions. Nor should they—the historical issues are too complex and the human stakes are too high. | more…
