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A Monthly Review project providing daily news and analysis of capitalism, imperialism and inequality rooted in Marxian political economy
The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.
The story of women’s prison growth has been obscured by overly broad discussions of the “total” prison population for too long. This report sheds more light on women in the era of mass incarceration by tracking prison population trends since 1978 for all 50 states.
A study last year by London University academics highlighted the shocking disparities in pay between individuals from different backgrounds. Most other papers treated this as minor news or ignored it altogether. The Morning Star rightly put it on the front page under the headline Working Class? That’ll be Six Grand off your Salary (and it […]
Schumpeter’s theory is interesting for several reasons. It was formulated at the same time as Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s and clearly with the knowledge of the two. It reacts to the exactly the same events as theirs. It is different though and it was held by Schumpeter throughout his life. The key text for Schumpeter’s theory […]
In this article I wish to make a simple claim: 20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths […]
The Last Jedi, the eighth episode of the legendary Star Wars series, has been out for less than 10 days but already boasts well over $650 million in revenue from the box office.
When e-commerce monolith Amazon introduced the Key in October, it was the latest in a series of innovations aimed at making our lives more user-friendly. Available exclusively to subscribers of Amazon Prime, the Key system—which consists of a programmable smart lock for the front door of one’s house, and a high-definition camera mounted nearby to […]
The 21st century has already welcomed back Karl Marx (1818-1883), rather on the assumption that he had faded away and has now returned to haunt us. After the financial crashes of 2008, his leonine face appeared on international news magazine covers, feature articles in quality broadsheets, TV documentaries and blogposts. The questions Why now? and […]
MISHA GLENNY’S new series McMafia was launched on BBC TV on New Year’s Day. It is an appropriate if depressing opener for the new year.
The U.S. State Department has endorsed the outcome of the November 26 elections in Honduras, which was surely the most farcical electoral process in recent history.
Colin Barker of Manchester rs21 introduced a panel discussion to launch the book Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression at the recent Historical Materialism conference in London . We reproduce Colin’s presentation here.
Interview with John Bellamy Foster, Editor of Monthly Review. By JIPSON JOHN and JITHEESH P.M.
1968 – 50 years ago – was the highpoint of the radicalism that had been sweeping the globe through the mid-60s from Belfast to Berlin, from Mexico to Melbourne, from Paris to Prague. It was a year of revolution and repression, of struggle and solidarity, of wild optimism and crushing defeat.
After the Global Financial Crisis, Steve Keen achieved worldwide acclaim with his book Debunking Economics (2011). It attacked the core tenets of neoclassical economics and some of its heterodox rivals. It also revealed Hyman Minsky’s post-Keynesianism as the most promising route to a scientific revolution in economics.
My father was a socialist, who participated in the Resistance against the Nazis. My mother leaned more towards anarchism. My first philosophy teacher, Jean Paul Sartre, was a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party. When I was a teenager, there was a terrible colonial war in Algeria and I stood up against it. When […]
In announcing his long-avoided royal commission into banking, Malcolm Turnbull said that “it will not put capitalism on trial”. What a shame!
The last four decades have been marked by rising wage inequality, with the vast majority of American workers experiencing wage stagnation while those at the top rung of the economic ladder reap the benefits of growth in productivity. These dynamics mean that many workers struggle to make ends meet; in 2016 one in five families […]
The meeting, attended by thousands of people, was thrilling and inspiring; all Italian communist parties and organisations, as well as environmentalist groups, social and community centres and workers associations took part in it.
Social reproduction theory (SRT) sounds quite intimidating, but the (rather grandiose) anthology of big words masks a relatively simple question: if capitalist production is fundamentally the production of commodities, and it is workers who produce such commodities, who ‘produces’ the worker?
Base-Superstructure Theory (BST) is Marx’s guiding general theory, but is long misunderstood. Deeply embedded in a monumental corpus of system-challenging analysis, it has become lost in secondary interpretations with partial takes and opposed propagandas militating against coherent comprehension.
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