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Notes from the Editors
September 2026 (Volume 78, Number 4)
Taking as a starting point two classic works of the mid-nineteenth century—Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil; or the Two Nations and Frederick Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England—this month's "Notes from the Editors" explores the way both authors articulated the plight of workers in their own era, drawing key parallels to our own time. The similarities are particularly conspicuous when examining the so-called affordability crisis, exposing the regime of social murder that accompanies the increasing polarization of economic life.
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Review of the Month
India’s Ruling Classes and the Global Crisis
In September's Review of the Month, the Research Unit for Political Economy delves into how the crisis pervading the world system, on stark display in the tech sector, global finance, and the sphere of production, lays bare the longstanding vulnerabilities of the Indian economy. As the contradictions in the neoliberal phase become unmistakable, the authors write, it is necessary to take a class-based approach to resolving the questions of how to bring about key questions regarding the productive life and development of India.
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Article
José Carlos Mariátegui and Local Traditions of Struggle
The relationship between Marxism and other revolutionary traditions is a key question for our time. If we approach the issue incorrectly, we risk Eurocentrism and underrecognizing Marxism's role in the Global South contexts where it is most vital and active. This article examines and extends José Carlos Mariátegui's dialectical approach to the issue, which demonstrates how Marxism is not diluted but strengthened through engagement with the thought and practice of existing struggles, while those struggles can, in turn, gain greater depth and groundedness through the same relationship.
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Article
Beyond Scarcity: Thomas Sowell and the Limits of Neoclassical Economics
Through the work of neoclassical economist Thomas Sowell, Elliot Goodell Ugalde dissects the orthodox view that takes for granted that scarcity is at the center of economic life. In a world of various kinds of surpluses, Goodell argues, the idea that scarcity is the only organizing principle of our economic is inadequate to describe the complex interactions of institutions, history, and social power that make up economic organization under capitalism.
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Reprise
The Economics of Destruction
In this 1980 talk by Joan Robinson, first published in MR in 1983, the economist painted a stark picture of global arms race fueled by military capitalism and imperialism. "The important question," she urged, "is not whether the rate of inflation is high or low or can be brought under control but whether our generation will succeed in destroying the world…. Economics should begin to address the important issue of our impending doom."
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Introduction
The Global Structural Crisis of Capital
John Bellamy Foster introduces our special summer issue on the "Structural Crisis of Capital," illuminating its four main characteristics as first outlined by István Mészáros in Marx's Theory of Alienation. Capital, Foster says, has found itself in a position akin to Lucian's sorcerer's apprentice: futilely attempting to control a runaway system that he had himself created, accumulating not only contradictions but outright catastrophe—with globe-spanning consequences.
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Article
On the Economic Crisis of Capitalism
Considering the "Structural Crisis of Capital" from the perspective of economics, Prabhat Patnaik sheds light on two major aspects that have risen to prominence in our current conjuncture. The first, rampant stagnation and unemployment, is clear and undeniable. The second, particular to the capitalism of the late twentieth century and the shedding of colonies on which imperial nations depended for wealth is particularly salient to Trump's economic strategy of economic recolonization not only through soft power, but direct military action.
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Article
Between the Times: Privatized Keynesianism, Permanent Catastrophe, and the Task of an Economy of Social Production
"Old-style neoliberalism," write Riccardo Bellofiore and Giovanna Vertova "is dead, or at least gravely ill. The new paradigm that may replace it has not yet been born or is not yet recognizable. In the middle, between the times, lies what we have proposed to call the permanent catastrophe: a regime in which capitalist responses in catastrophic form have become the norm, in which crises are no longer overcome but accumulate."
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Article
U.S. Imperialism Resurgent
It is quite evident, Costas Lapavitsas begins, that the world is currently ensnared in geopolitical turmoil, perhaps for over a decade. In this article, Lapavitsas provides insight into the inseparable and interlocking mechanisms of dollar dominance and imperialism backed by the escalatory militarism of the second Trump administration. As Lapavitsas notes: "The dollar and the F-35—monetary coercion and military power—are two moments of a single structure of domination."
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Article
Monetary Policy and Capitalism
Jan Toporowski explains our contemporary age of "monetary policy dominance": the era in which the setting of short-term interest rates by the central banks is seen as the key instrument for regulating economic activity. This, however, does not reflect an ironclad law of the business cycle but, rather, a set of assumptions that underscores the dependence of capitalism on the accumulation of capital itself. This in turn obscures deeper truths about the effectiveness of monetary policy on the daily lives of the working class.
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Article
Why Can China Resist Financialization?
Over the last half-century, the "financial explosion"—manifest in the unrestrained expansion of financialization and its tools and institutions—has fundamentally reshaped the global economy, impacting countries throughout the Global North and South. China, however, has proven to be a distinctive case. Xiaolu Kuang, Zhi Li, and Fusheng Xie probe the question of how and why China has managed to maintain its emphasis on production above finance, and the development all above the accumulation of capital.
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Article
Imperialism in a Full World: Neomercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game
Since the wane of mercantilism in Europe, conceptions of wealth, trade, and productivity have also changed: from one of a zero-sum game reliant only on the productivity of land, to one of the potential for positive-sum wealth created by industry, and, now, to the zero-sum neomercantilism necessitated in a world of resource depletion, where the earth is pushed to its biophysical limits. But the response to this crisis does not have to be further fortification—it could also be a world that organizes itself within the metabolic limitations of nature.
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Article
Value Chains in the Digital Age: Labor Exploitation and Systemic Ecocide
In order to comprehend the environmental crisis that goes hand-in-hand with the "Structural Crisis of Capital," we must also understand the nature of global value chains and how they contribute to environmental degradation and worker exploitation on a global level. Benjamin Selwyn elucidates how global value chains and digitalization sit within a "conjoined dynamic of labor-exploitative accumulation and ecological expropriation."
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New! “Grand Theft Capital”, by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
A New York Times headline in early 2026 announced what many workers have known for years: “For Many Cash-Strapped Americans, ‘Basic Living has become a Burden.’” Living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little... READ MORE
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New: “‘Black Marxism’: A Marxist Critique”, by August Nimtz
The latest, an interview by Constantin Berlin, for Jacobin: "The recently published collection, 'Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique,' makes accessible, for the first time, a critique that spans four decades and addresses Robinson’s claims and those made by his followers by putting forth an authentic Marxism as the most reliable method for human liberation in the real world and explaining why it remains the guiding principle for the transracial class struggle today...."
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New: “Requiem for French Theory” by Aymeric Monville, Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill
The latest: "In this episode of Coming From Left Field, philosopher and cultural critic Gabriel Rockhill joins Greg Godels & Pat Cummings to explore the Ford Foundation, the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference often cited as a launching point for French Theory in the United States, Cold War cultural politics, and the wider political economy of academic knowledge production...."
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Recently reissued: The Rainbow Challenge (Excerpt)
"Jesse Jackson’s first presidential primary race in 1984 should have been a wakeup call for the Democratic Party...."
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