{"id":319174,"date":"2026-08-10T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=319174"},"modified":"2026-08-07T19:19:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T18:19:25","slug":"the-global-structural-crisis-of-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/08\/the-global-structural-crisis-of-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"The Global Structural Crisis of Capital"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cThe Idol of Monopoly\u201d by Paul Krafft, from W. S. Harris, Capital and Labor (1907)<\/p><\/div>\n

“I believe that it is not given to us to speak in terms of future centuries\u2026we have no time to waste; the challenge is to save the conditions of life on this planet, to save the human species, to change the course of history, to change the world.”<\/em>
\n— Hugo Ch\u00e1vez1<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The notion of a \u201cglobal structural crisis of capital\u201d defining our times was first introduced by Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros in the third edition of his Marx\u2019s Theory of Alienation<\/i> in 1971, and in his Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, \u201cThe Necessity of Social Control\u201d that same year.2<\/sup><\/a> In 1995 in Beyond Capital<\/i>, M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros distinguished the emerging, epochal structural crisis of capital from the cyclical and conjunctural crises that are \u201ccapital\u2019s natural<\/i> mode of existence.\u201d Today\u2019s structural crisis, he explained, has four characteristics that distinguish it historically, focusing here primarily on its economic dimensions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Its character<\/i> is universal<\/i>, rather than restricted to one particular sphere (for example, financial, or commercial, or affecting this or that particular branch of production, or applying to this rather than that type of labor, with its specific range of skills and degrees of productivity, and so on).<\/li>\n
  2. Its scope<\/i> is truly global<\/i> (in the most threateningly literal sense of the term), rather than confined to a particular set of countries (as all major crises have been in the past).<\/li>\n
  3. Its time scale<\/i> is extended, continuous\u2014if you like: permanent<\/i>\u2014rather than limited and cyclic<\/i>, as all former crises of capital, happened to be.<\/li>\n
  4. Its mode<\/i> of unfolding might be called creeping<\/i>\u2014in contrast to the more spectacular and dramatic eruptions and collapses of the past\u2014while adding the proviso that even the most vehement and violent convulsions cannot be excluded as far as the future is concerned: that is, when the complex machinery now actively engaged in \u201ccrisis management\u201d and in the more or less temporary \u201cdisplacement\u201d of the growing contradictions runs out of steam.3<\/sup><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    All of this signifies that the current mode of production is approaching the absolute limits of its mode of social metabolic reproduction, evident not simply in its growing economic contradictions\u2014since production, consumption, and circulation define its internal structure\u2014but also in every aspect of material reality. A structural crisis comes into play when not simply the \u201cimmediate<\/i> limits\u201d of the system but also its \u201cultimate<\/i> limits\u201d are in question, since this affects \u201cthe totality<\/i> of a social complex.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> This is particularly evident in the environmental realm, which capital, in its pursuit of endless accumulation, treats as consisting of mere barriers that need to be overcome or dumping grounds for its waste, rather than adhering to planetary boundaries and natural laws.5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The structural crisis of capital is reflected in chronic disruptions and system failures in all aspects of social metabolic reproduction, not simply in terms of immediate material conditions (whether economic or ecological) but also including relations of class\/property, the state, family\/gender relations, and racial\/racist control structures endemic to capitalism and built up over the centuries. The disruption of the totality of the social complex extends to the destruction of a unified culture, and of the means of reason\u2014all of which are reflected in the growth of irrationalism and the resurgence of regressive forces.6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The deepening contradictions of capital\u2019s social metabolic order are ultimately to be fought out on the level of the imperialist world system. The division of the world capitalist economy into competing nation-states is an insuperable characteristic of the system. M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros wrote in Socialism or Barbarism<\/i> in 2001 that the world was now facing \u201cthe potentially deadliest phase of imperialism\u201d as the United States sought to maintain and even extend its global hegemony in the context of a weakening world economic order, increasingly resorting to military and other coercive means. This raised the question of permanent war leading to nuclear war, if a revolutionary and socialist path beyond capital were not found. He followed Rosa Luxemburg in saying that we are faced with a choice between \u201csocialism or barbarism\u201d\u2014while adding to this a \u201cqualification: \u2018barbarism if we are lucky.’\u201d This signified that barbarism in this day and age could easily lead to \u201cthe extermination of humanity<\/i>\u201d either through a general thermonuclear exchange or planetary ecological crisis. Hence, the full gravity of the epochal structural crisis facing humanity was underscored.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Monopoly capitalism, in M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019s view, increasingly took the form of \u201cgangster capitalism\u201d due to the enormous and expanding concentration and centralization of capital and the resulting loss of social control on the part of the state, with the system\u2019s normal remedial actions proving increasingly ineffective.8<\/sup><\/a> More and more, the world capitalist order has become dependent on military and financial adventurism reflecting nothing so much as the fact that the center no longer holds. Overaccumulation, excess capacity, and waste have come to characterize the entire system.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Shallow Syncretism as a Form of Denialism<\/h2>\n

    Naturally, given a global structural crisis of capital of the kind that M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros described, one could expect that today\u2019s vested interests, however myopic, would be conscious of it to some extent, and that this would be reflected in the social theory of our times. Yet, the apologetic and alienated character of prevailing social analysis means that such recognition is displayed only indirectly in the form of the perception of particular contradictions and convulsions, disconnected from the dominant political-economic system and its relation to its environment. Thus, there has emerged in recent years the notion of a polycrisis<\/i>, or multiple crises coming from all directions, constituting an assemblage<\/i> of crises, conceived in Latourian, posthumanist terms, lacking any integral connection. A fundamental rule determining the now prevailing \u201cpolycrisis\u201d concept, which has been promoted by influential social scientists like Adam Tooze and by such institutions as the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is that it is seen as having no direct relation to capitalism itself.<\/p>\n

    The concept of polycrisis originated in the work of French social theorist Edgar Morin (together with Anne Brigitte Kern) in the 1990s and was later developed further and popularized by Tooze and others. In Morin and Kern\u2019s book, Homeland Earth<\/i>, polycrisis was introduced as a category meant to negate the notion that it was possible to \u201csingle out a number one problem to which all others would be subordinated\u201d or even to construct a hierarchy of critical problems in the world. Capitalism is almost completely absent from Morin\u2019s reactionary Cold War\/post-Cold War frame. All problems are associated vaguely with modernity or \u201ctechnoscience,\u201d that is, removed from both structure and agency, and from the social relations of production, along with any coherent historical perspective. For Morin, there is no escape (except into the realm of the \u201cspirit,\u201d which he refers to as the \u201cfirst resistance\u201d).10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Tooze, the foremost proponent of the polycrisis thesis today, holds an endowed chair at Columbia University. He has written several articles for New Left Review<\/i>, is a columnist for the prominent U.S. New Cold War organ Foreign Policy<\/i>, and has \u201ccontributed\u201d to the U.S. National Intelligence Council, part of the U.S. national security apparatus. He describes himself today as a \u201cLatourian left liberal.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a> In highlighting the concept of polycrisis, he rejects any notion that the present age of catastrophe is intrinsically related to capitalism, or even subject to rational critique:<\/p>\n

    To the frustration of its many critics, the concept of polycrisis lacks the respectable intellectual genealogy and analytical guts that a good critical theorist would expect. To me, that is precisely why it seems right for our moment. In its lack of specification, the polycrisis concept serves as a reminder of the indeterminacy and uncertainty and complexity that we have lost amidst the bold new certainties of the \u201ccapitalocene\u201d\u2026. Polycrisis is underspecified. It is a weak theory. But those who criticize that in the name of greater clarity or stronger theory underestimate the scale of the mess that we are in.12<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    For Tooze, those in the Marxian tradition who focus on the global structural crisis of capital (referred to superciliously here as \u201cthe bold new certainties of the \u2018capitalocene’\u201d) \u201cunderestimate the scale of the mess\u201d the world is confronting. His stated preference for polycrisis as \u201ca weak theory\u201d\u2014in line with the posthumanist philosophy of Bruno Latour\u2014conceives it as having the advantage of lacking clarity<\/i>, representing a conglomeration of \u201cunderspecified\u201d crises that accurately reflect the uncertainty, confusion, and paralysis of our times.13<\/sup><\/a> At best, he offers what Karl Marx referred to as a \u201cshallow syncretism\u201d as a substitute for a materialist, historical, and dialectical analysis aimed at confronting the burgeoning contradictions of capital.14<\/sup><\/a> His analysis has been characterized in the literature as phenomenological, focusing on interactions and thick descriptions, while neglecting causality.15<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    A similar evasiveness and rejection of any connection of polycrisis to capitalism is exhibited in reports emanating from the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the OECD. In \u201cWe\u2019re on the Brink of a \u2018Polycrisis\u2019\u2014How Worried Should We Be?,\u201d senior World Economic Forum writer Simon Torkington divides the polycrisis into five potential categories: economic, ecological, geopolitical, social, and technological. Of these only the final four are said to have contributed to the polycrisis. The secular slowdown in the world economy is thus explained by a hybrid assemblage of factors that is somehow external to it. Indeed, capitalism as the principal theoretical category for conceptualizing the world economy does not appear at all in the World Economic Forum\u2019s 2023 Global Risks Report<\/i> focusing on the polycrisis.16<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    A parallel result can be found in the World Bank\u2019s 2024 report, Pathways Out of the Polycrisis<\/i>. Careful readers of the report will find only the vaguest accounts of the \u201cpolycrisis\u201d and no genuine \u201cpathways out.\u201d Here the polycrisis is primarily significant for its effects on the economy and is thus blamed for \u201cslow growth prospects and high levels of debt,\u201d together with increased economic \u201cuncertainty, fragility, and polarization.\u201d In the World Bank\u2019s most concrete definition, we are told that a \u201cpolycrisis<\/i> refers to multiple interconnected crises occurring simultaneously, where the interactions amplify the overall impact.\u201d Significantly, there is no reference to capitalism, or to capital as a governing social relation, anywhere in the World Bank\u2019s report on the polycrisis.17<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The OECD addresses polycrisis in its 2025 States of Fragility<\/i> report. We are informed of \u201cthe increasing prevalence of polycrises\u2014a confluence of global challenges\u2014[that] disproportionately impact conflict-affected countries, already grappling with significant vulnerabilities\u201d and bearing the brunt of \u201ccascading crises.\u201d The answer is a \u201cparadigm shift\u201d at the level of ideas emphasizing a whole \u201cfragility spectrum,\u201d requiring increased \u201cresilience\u201d\u2014 meaning that the responses to the growing disasters should not fall on the system but on particular individuals\/entities, who will be forced to cope on their own. Capitalism as such is not mentioned or seen as related to the polycrisis in any way, although \u201cauthoritarian capitalism\u201d and \u201ccrony capitalism\u201d are derided in the report.18<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    All of these treatments of polycrisis can be seen as ideological responses to the global structural crisis of capital, while denying that there is a structural crisis of the system or that the polycrisis is in any way connected to capitalism itself. Nevertheless, the very fact that the notion of a polycrisis is now so paramount in discussions within the highest echelons of the world economy is itself a backward admission of the fact that the common denominator of today\u2019s multifaceted global malaise is the structural crisis of late-stage (monopoly) capitalism.<\/p>\n

    The Sorcerer\u2019s Out of Control Spells<\/h2>\n

    It is one of those ironies of history that the concepts of socialism and communism antedate that of capitalism. Thus, in The Communist Manifesto<\/i> (1848) by Marx and Frederick Engels, there is no mention of capitalism<\/i>, a word that first arose in English in William Makepeace Thackeray\u2019s novel The Newcomes<\/i> (serialized in 1853\u20131855)\u2014with the term appearing in French and German at about the same time. (Nor did Marx employ the concept of capitalism, as opposed to capital and capitalist, in his great work, Capital<\/i> [1867]).19<\/sup><\/a> Instead, Marx and Engels in the Manifesto<\/i> wrote about the rising class of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), identifying this class directly with capital<\/i> as a social relation.20<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Part One of the Manifesto<\/i>, entitled \u201cBourgeois and Proletarians,\u201d consists of two sections. A little less than half of Part One is devoted to what Joseph Schumpeter was to characterize as a \u201cpanegyric upon bourgeois achievement that has no equal in economic literature.\u201d21<\/sup><\/a> Here Marx and Engels praise to the skies the revolutionary achievements of the bourgeoisie in transcending feudalism and in the process transforming the entire world. Few passages in the Manifesto<\/i> have been quoted more in recent decades than the statement: \u201cThe need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.\u201d22<\/sup><\/a> Passages like this have led to the designation of Marx and Engels as the first theorists of globalization.23<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Nevertheless, the panegyric ends around halfway through Part One of the Manifesto<\/i>, beginning with the sentences: \u201cA similar movement [to the transition from feudal to bourgeois society] is going on before our eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.\u201d24<\/sup><\/a> What follows is a discussion of the contradictions and crises of capital, both conjunctural and structural, pointing to overproduction, the business cycle with its periodic downturns, environmental dislocations (the division between town and country), the superexploitation of women and children, the destruction of familial relations, and, above all, the rise of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism, a new revolutionary class. Part One of the Manifesto<\/i> thus establishes a dialectical relation between the still ascending and eventual descending phases of capital as a mode of production. For Marx and Engels, it was a historical certainty that the bourgeoisie would not in the end be able fully to control the forces of the \u201cnether world\u201d it had conjured up\u2014marking the transition point in Part One of the Manifesto<\/i>.<\/p>\n

    At least from the time he wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus\u2019s materialist philosophy, Marx was drawn to the work of the great Greek satirist Lucian (born c. 117 CE).25<\/sup><\/a> In his dialogue \u201cThe Lover of Lies,\u201d Lucian told the story of a sorcerer\u2019s apprentice, who had watched on repeated occasions his master\u2019s dressing up of broomsticks, pestles, and door handles and then casting spells on them to turn them into workers who would do his bidding, such as fetching water, buying provisions, and preparing meals\u2014everything that a slave would normally be required to do. In his master\u2019s absence one day, the apprentice decided to try his hand at the spell, turning a pestle into a worker to fetch water. But when the pestle worker had filled the jar with water and brought it into the house, the sorcerer\u2019s apprentice could not get it to stop or turn it into a pestle again. Instead, it kept on bringing water, flooding the house by \u201cpouring it in.\u201d In desperation, the apprentice took an axe and cut the pestle worker in two. The result, though, was to create two pestle workers, each repeatedly fetching a jar of water and flooding the house. The flood would have overtaken not only the house but the village itself since there was no stopping them, but luckily the sorcerer showed up and turned the pestles into wood again.26<\/sup><\/a> Lucian\u2019s story was taken up by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in early nineteenth-century Germany in his ballad \u201cThe Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice,\u201d though there the spell is cast on broomsticks, the jars are buckets, while the uncontrollable waters \u201crush in with roar and clatter.\u201d27<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    If Lucian and Goethe were Marx and Engels\u2019s inspiration for their allegory, there is in the Manifesto<\/i> no all-powerful sorcerer present to reverse the apprentice\u2019s uncontrolled spells. Rather, the sorcerer\u2019s own out of control spells represent here the unintended consequences resulting from the unearthly meddling of the individual bourgeois (the personification of capital) in the nature of things. Devoid of all restraint, capital is unable to reverse its spells once it has raised \u201cthe powers of the nether world,\u201d generating crises and contradictions, and conjuring up its own gravedigger in the proletariat. The workers are not wooden broomsticks or pestles, but human beings, who ultimately resist. Aristotle in antiquity had dreamed of automatons replacing slaves, but any attempt to replace real-live workers with automatons (or to turn workers themselves into automatons) only intensifies the class struggle.28<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    In its inner essence, capitalism is a class-based exploitative system driven by the accumulation of capital on behalf of a very few. The capitalist, as the personification of capital, is constantly propelled onward, continually revolutionizing the means of production. Yet, a social system organized on this basis moves only by way of contradictions, internally exploiting and externally expropriating everything that does not belong to its alienated, fetishistic being. Consequently, the accumulation of capital is also the accumulation of the potential for catastrophe. Such a system can exist and even prosper on a small scale but the more global it becomes, the more its internal and external limits become visible. It is an extreme example of a dissipative system appropriating everything it can and dumping its detritus in its environment.29<\/sup><\/a> In this way, through its constant expansion, capital erects barriers to its own advance, eventually generating a kind of punctuated equilibrium, in which the system becomes increasingly unstable and all real social control dissolves\u2014only to be replaced by evermore coercive and ineffective mechanisms that multiply the state of disorder, generating an \u201cempire of chaos.\u201d30<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    What has been called \u201cthe regime of capital\u201d can be seen in Marx\u2019s general formula for capital, M\u2013C\u2013M\u2032, where M stands for money, C for Commodities, and M\u2032 for M plus \u0394m, or more money, that is, surplus value. The entire object of capitalist production is to generate surplus value for accumulation without end, so that the surplus value obtained in a single production cycle, say in a year, is reinvested, resulting in M\u2032\u2013C\u2013M\u2032\u2032 in the second year, M\u2032\u2032\u2013C\u2013M\u2032\u2032\u2032 in the third year, and so on, in successive years.31<\/sup><\/a> This is what Marx meant in referring to capital as \u201cself-expanding value.\u201d \u201cAccumulate, Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!\u201d\u2014for capital.32<\/sup><\/a> The result is the concentration of mountains of capital in a few hands. This process is further accelerated by what Marx called the centralization of capital, through the development of the credit\/debt or financial system, including the market for industrial securities, forming great conglomerations of capital that emerge in \u201cthe twinkling of an eye.\u201d33<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Capital accumulation is a product of the exploitation of workers, who labor beyond the point necessary to reproduce the value of their labor power and thereby create surplus value for the capitalists, who then\u2014insofar as the accumulation process is functioning properly\u2014invest this surplus in the further expansion of production. Yet, accumulation through exploitation<\/i> of workers in production is also invariably accompanied by a wider process of expropriation<\/i> built on robbing both labor and nature, which further contributes to the amassing of wealth. What Marx called \u201cthe negative, i.e. destructive side\u201d of capital\u2019s interaction with nature \u201cfrom the point of view of natural science\u201d is therefore constantly present as the underside of the accumulation process.34<\/sup><\/a> The accumulation of capital<\/i> is invariably accompanied by the accumulation of catastrophe<\/i>\u2014both actual and potential.<\/p>\n

    Here it is useful to examine what world-historian William McNeill in The Global Condition<\/i> (1992) called the law of the \u201cconservation of catastrophe.\u201d McNeill applied this to ecological crisis in particular, arguing that \u201ccatastrophe is the underside of the human condition\u2014a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools.\u201d The better we become at human production or in the transformation of our relation to nature, the more vulnerable human society becomes to catastrophes that \u201crecur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.\u201d35<\/sup><\/a> The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved<\/i>, but can be said\u2014taking into account capital\u2019s drive to endless exponential accumulation\u2014to be cumulative<\/i>, reappearing in ever more colossal forms in an increasingly alienated environment.<\/p>\n

    In many respects, capital has reached the point of the activation of its \u201cabsolute limits,\u201d as a viable mode of social metabolic reproduction.36<\/sup><\/a> The Anthropocene epoch widely recognized in natural science (though rejected as an official designation by the conservative International Union of Geological Sciences) signifies the fact that, since the 1950s, if not before, humanity has emerged as the leading force in Earth System change due to the Great Acceleration that commenced in those years.37<\/sup><\/a> Seven of the planetary boundaries that define a safe planetary environment for humanity have now been crossed.38<\/sup><\/a> Today, the scale of human economic processes rivals the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, opening up the possibility of multiple catastrophic events.39<\/sup><\/a> Climate change itself threatens the lives and\/or livelihoods of billions of people this century and human civilization, posing an existential threat to humanity. Accelerating climate change, due to the crossing of various tipping points, promises to generate cascading ecological catastrophes, degrading every ecological system on Earth.<\/p>\n

    In Capital<\/i>, Marx addressed capital\u2019s generation of an \u201cirreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,\u201d namely, the metabolic rift<\/i>.40<\/sup><\/a> This was manifested in his time by a rift in soil fertility, as soil nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium were shipped in food and fiber hundreds, and even thousands, of miles to the new industrial cities, where the former chemical nutrients ended up polluting the urban environments and were lost to the soil. Today we live in a world where the overaccumulation of capital and an imperialist world system have created a logic of catastrophe: the constant spread of metabolic rifts.41<\/sup><\/a> The COVID-19 pandemic was itself a product of capitalist overreach on the earth, as agribusiness seeks to break down all natural barriers hindering its expansion, thereby destroying ecosystems and habitats with little if any controls, resulting in new zoonoses. The pandemic spread globally along the pathways created by capitalist value chains\u2014a warning of similar developments in the future.42<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    In the nineteenth century, locomotive engineers and firemen, under extreme time pressures resulting from the relentless speed-up by capital, sometimes resorted to wedging or fastening down the safety valves on the engines, jamming them so they would not open on their own. The result was a much greater risk, as the engine boilers built up pressure far beyond what they were designed safely to accommodate. On quite a number of occasions, engineers, suddenly realizing the danger as the boiler pressure increased to perilous levels, found themselves unable manually to force open the jammed safety valves in time, resulting in explosions and derailments. This led Engels to observe metaphorically that the capitalist class was \u201ca class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open.\u201d Capital\u2019s inability to control \u201cthe productive forces, which have grown beyond its power,\u201d including the destructive effects imposed on its natural and social environs, was \u201cdriving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.\u201d43<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Capitalist Maturity and Structural Crisis<\/h2>\n

    The global structural crisis of capital in our times is not simply an abstract product of capital\u2019s inner drives but also is manifested concretely in the emergence of capitalist maturity: the age of monopoly-finance capital, late imperialism, and neoliberalism\/neofascism. There has long been a widespread agreement among Marxists, though short of complete consensus, that the history of capitalism has been characterized by three stages.44<\/sup><\/a> The first of these was mercantilism (or merchant capitalism), which arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and extended well into the eighteenth century. This was associated at the level of production with the period of manufacture<\/i> in the original sense of handicraft production organized into a factory system, allowing for the development of the division of labor\u2014as explained by Adam Smith at the outset of The Wealth of Nations<\/i>. Under mercantilism, what Marx in his reproduction schemes in the second volume of Capital<\/i> called Department I (producing means of production)\u2014as opposed to Department II (producing means of consumption)\u2014was still small, both absolutely and in relation to the economy as a whole.45<\/sup><\/a> Production and the pursuit of wealth occurred mainly in commerce, agriculture, and mining. This was the period of the enclosure of the commons making possible a vast concentration of land ownership along with the onset of colonial conquest of the world\u2014a process inseparable from capitalism from its inception.<\/p>\n

    The second stage in capitalist development, often referred to as (freely) competitive capitalism, was associated with the inauguration near the end of the eighteenth century of the Industrial Revolution. This itself was made possible by the prior expropriation of land through the enclosures and by the expropriation of the wealth and labor (encompassing the trans-Atlantic slave trade) of the noncapitalist world, in what classical economists like Smith referred to as \u201coriginal accumulation,\u201d and what Marx, far more critically, referred to as \u201cso-called primitive [original] accumulation\u201d\u2014or, more exactly, as \u201coriginal expropriation.\u201d46<\/sup><\/a> This was the age of \u201cmodern industry\u201d or machino<\/i>facture, as opposed to manu<\/i>facture. The shift in this period was toward the buildup in the capitalist core of means of production, or Department I, not only in the form of machine factories, but a vast transportation infrastructure symbolized by railroads, telegraphs, and steamships. As in earlier periods, there was considerable warfare between capitalist states. However, Britain, because of its earlier industrialization, \u201cruled the waves,\u201d establishing itself as the hegemonic capitalist power with a vast colonial system from which it extracted surplus.<\/p>\n

    The third stage, generally referred to as monopoly capitalism, emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, resulting from what Marx called the concentration and centralization of capital and the rise of the modern corporate form of business organization as manifested in the financial market for industrial securities.47<\/sup><\/a> In this stage, expansion of Department I established the basis for a vast expansion of Department II, with both reaching a mature state of industrialization. The result was \u201ca tendency<\/i> to overaccumulation\u201d in which expansion of Department I became increasingly dependent on expansion of Department II, and the overall condition was one of market saturation. This blockage ultimately can be traced to limitations on the wages and consumption of workers and the accumulation of immeasurable wealth at the top of society.48<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The inner tendency toward capitalist maturity and overaccumulation was further intensified by the dominance of monopoly capital due to the concentration and centralization of corporate capital. A relatively small and ever diminishing number of firms came to account for the bulk of production and profits. This led to a shift away from the centrality of price competition, which had served as the main equilibrating force of the system during the freely competitive stage of capitalism. With the consolidation of the monopoly stage, genuine price competition between corporations was effectively banned, leading to the dominance of oligopolistic pricing in mature industries. The result is that the general price level for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has gone only one way\u2014up.49<\/sup><\/a> Internecine price competition still occurred in the small business sector, and in newly emerging markets during the shake-down process prior to the consolidation of an industry under the control of a few firms. Moreover, fierce competition continued to rage between the big monopolistic entities over low-cost position and within the sales-effort (marketing). But the banning of price competition in mature industries dominated by a few monopolistic corporations meant that big business enterprises now benefited from increased monopoly\/market power in relation to the economy as a whole. Such massive corporate entities were not compelled to maximize production and investment by the force of price competition. Instead, they were able to cut back on production in the face of weak effective demand, maintaining their profit margins, while retaining considerable excess capacity. This led to an atrophy of net investment and a decline in the secular growth trend of the economy. Monopoly capitalism therefore came to be characterized by a tendency to overaccumulation and stagnation (sluggish net investment, slow growth, excess capacity, and high unemployment\/underemployment).50<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Although Marx theorized the concentration and centralization of capital, and Engels was able to add to the conception of this in his final years, the theory of monopoly capitalism as such first arose with Rudolf Hilferding\u2019s Finance Capital<\/i> (1910), V. I. Lenin\u2019s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism<\/i> (1916), and Thorstein Veblen\u2019s The Theory of Business Enterprise<\/i> (1904) and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times<\/i> (1923).51<\/sup><\/a> In the analysis of all three thinkers, monopoly capitalism was characterized by the dominance of giant monopolistic corporations, the rise of finance, and the growth of imperialism. For Lenin, monopoly capitalism constituted a separate stage of capitalism, which was also the imperialist stage<\/i> (as distinct from imperialism in a more general sense, which, for Lenin, embraced colonialism and existed throughout the history of capitalism).52<\/sup><\/a> \u201cIf it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwe should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.\u201d53<\/sup><\/a> Lenin\u2019s analysis focused on the division of the entire world between the great capitalist powers, in which he singled out Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.54<\/sup><\/a> The wars of the great imperial powers over global position led to the First World War (and eventually to the Second World War). In developing his complex historical theory of imperialism, Lenin pointed again and again to what he called \u201cthe economic and political essence of imperialism,\u201d that is, the division of the world into \u201coppressor\u201d and \u201coppressed\u201d countries, from which the imperialist nations and their monopolistic corporations extracted \u201csuperprofits.\u201d The key to revolution, he contended, had shifted from the imperial center to the periphery of the system.55<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Following the Second World War the United States emerged as the unrivaled hegemonic power of the capitalist system. The other great imperial powers\u2014Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan\u2014had all been devastated in the war. The United States aided in their reconstruction, relegating them\u2014as Paul A. Baran noted in The Political Economy of Growth<\/i> (1957)\u2014to the status of \u201cjunior partners\u201d in the U.S. imperium.56<\/sup><\/a> Today the United States and its junior partners in the historical \u201cgreat powers\u201d plus Canada, make up the G7, which constitutes the ruling core of the imperialist world system, with Washington at its head.<\/p>\n

    The First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression in the interim had loosened control over the colonies, and waves of revolution and decolonization swept the globe, sparked by the Russian Revolution in 1917.57<\/sup><\/a> All seven members of today\u2019s G7 engaged in military interventions in Soviet Russia\u2014either during its Civil War, or, in the case of Nazi Germany, in a full-scale invasion of the USSR during the Third Reich. These interventions, however, were all defeated, and the USSR emerged after the Second World War\u2014which was won in Europe almost entirely by the Red Army standing alone\u2014as a nuclear superpower, lying outside the Western imperial order. A Cold War division was erected between the United States\/NATO and the Soviet Union (resulting in a nuclear arms race), and between the United States and China, following its revolution in 1949. In reality, however, the Cold War, aggressively pursued by the United States, was more about the imperialist suppression of revolutions throughout the globe than the so-called \u201ccontainment\u201d of the Soviet Union (which was dedicated to \u201csocialism in one country\u201d).58<\/sup><\/a> Numerous military interventions were carried out by the United States, and secondarily by Britain and France, seeking to push back the tide of decolonization and socialist revolution, in order to guarantee third world dependency and the continued imperialist \u201csiphoning off\u201d of economic surplus from the periphery.59<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The Long Emergency60<\/sup><\/a><\/h2>\n

    In the mid-1960s, Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, building on the work of Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg, as well as on the contemporary work of Marxist economists Micha\u0142 Kalecki and Josef Steindl, wrote Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order<\/i>.61<\/sup><\/a> Baran and Sweezy contended that there was a tendency to stagnation of accumulation under monopoly capitalism due to the overaccumulation of economic surplus (surplus value), which could not find profitable outlets for investment. Writing at the peak of the Vietnam War, they argued that the economy was being supported by military spending, a second wave of automobilization, an enormous sales effort and economic waste in general, and the expansion of credit\/finance.62<\/sup><\/a> But as these and other historical factors supporting accumulation waned or ran into barriers to their expansion, the result would inevitably be the return of the specter of economic crisis and deepening stagnation. Monopoly capitalism, they indicated, was an \u201cirrational system,\u201d visible not just at the macro level, but also, and more importantly, at the micro level, in the exploitation of all workers in industry; the superexploitation of women; racism; imperialism; and a general cultural flattening\u2014with the emergence of a cultural apparatus emphasizing quantity over quality, sales over meaningful content. Resistance to these conditions, they argued, was inevitable on a worldwide scale, but was strongest, most revolutionary in character, in the periphery of the system, and in the struggles of the racially oppressed caught up in the colonial diaspora.63<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    In the early 1970s, a few years after Baran and Sweezy\u2019s book appeared, a number of tectonic shifts arose within the world capitalist economy. The U.S. defeat in Vietnam pointed to the limits of its power, while the enormous expenditures abroad on military bases and endless war\u2014marked by two major regional wars in Asia\u2014had resulted in the proliferation of dollars abroad, bringing the dollar-gold standard to an end, and its replacement by the more fragile hegemony of the dollar (backed up by the emergence of a petrodollar system in which all oil sales were designated in dollars). The decline of U.S. military spending in GDP following the Vietnam War contributed to a deep economic downturn\u2014also induced by a slowdown in the automobilization of the economy, the energy crisis of those years (associated with the 1973 Israeli-Arab War), and a general waning of some of the extraordinary conditions (high consumer liquidity, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, and the stimulus to world trade in the early years of U.S. hegemony) that had spurred economic growth in what is now sometimes referred to by economists as the \u201cgolden age of capitalism.\u201d64<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Already in the 1970s, and much more pronounced in the \u201980s, economic stagnation in production gave rise to the financialization of the economy, as the atrophy of net investment in production set in, while capital increasingly sought to preserve and extend its economic surplus (surplus value) by amassing wealth through purely financial means, with the result that finance grew rapidly and out of proportion to production. The financial explosion generated increased financial fragility and instability, threatening the entire system.65<\/sup><\/a> Politically, financialization gave rise to neoliberalism, which first arose as a response to the economic crisis of the 1970s, but quickly evolved into a political-economic regime governed by the triumph of monopoly-finance capital<\/i>, or the merging of monopoly capital based in production with financialization.66<\/sup><\/a> All aspects of social existence and livelihood\u2014health care, insurance, education, pensions, housing, transportation, and communication\u2014were subject to the relentless logic of financialization, expedited by private equity, increasing the costs and reducing the benefits for the general population. Today in the developed capitalist economies themselves workers are experiencing a growing \u201caffordability crisis\u201d as monopoly-finance capital seeks to use every means possible to take from the poor and give to the rich.67<\/sup><\/a> AI capital consisting of \u201chyperscalers\u201d such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google (Alphabet), and Meta, are massively investing in data centers, which promise to eliminate tens of millions of jobs, replacing them with AI automatons, while robotizing the remaining workers.68<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Faced with economic slowdown in the late 1960s and early \u201970s, the United States sought to exploit the geopolitical discord between the Soviet Union and China, known as the Sino-Soviet split, and to gain access to the immense Chinese market, while further isolating the USSR. Under Richard Nixon\u2019s presidency, Washington initiated the opening up of the capitalist world economy to China, sparking Beijing\u2019s own partial opening up to the world market. This led to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy. The globalization of production accelerated with U.S. and European corporations moving production massively to China and the Global South as a whole in search of low unit labor costs. Multinational corporations developed a more extensive system of unequal exchange<\/i> (where the differences in wages are greater than the differences in productivity) via global value chains through which the megacorporations in the Global North realized superprofits, aggravating the tendency to overaccumulation in the center.69<\/sup><\/a> Meanwhile, China was to emerge as the engine of the world economy, eventually displacing the role of the United States as the world manufacturing powerhouse. China, a hybrid socialist-led and semi-planned economy with a large state sector, accounts today for around 29 percent of global manufacturing value added, while the United States accounts for about 17 percent. Approximately 70 percent of the world\u2019s countries now trade more with China than the United States\u2014even though the former is still a poor country in per capita terms, with wages far below those of the core capitalist countries.70<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 produced a geopolitical vacuum and a brief unipolar moment during which the United States initiated a more \u201cnaked imperialism\u201d aimed at regime change in nations in West Asia, the Balkans, North Africa, and elsewhere, targeting countries that were formerly in the Soviet sphere and\/or had managed to delink to some extent from the capitalist world economy, resisting the U.S. imperium.71<\/sup><\/a> Washington unleashed an unprecedented set of military interventions designed to restore its weakening economic hegemony and to establish itself as the de facto<\/i> ruling force in the world capitalist order. The grand imperial strategy included the expansion of NATO all the way to Ukraine with the goal of destabilizing and dismantling Russia, which had reemerged as a great power early in the twenty-first century. This culminated in the U.S.-supported Maidan coup in 2014, overthrowing the democratically elected president in Ukraine, and the onset of the Ukrainian Civil War. This was followed by the Ukraine\/NATO proxy war with Russia, beginning in 2022, putting the world at the brink of nuclear war.72<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The Great Financial Crisis of 2007\u20132009, emerging in the United States, demonstrated how unstable the highly financialized economy in the capitalist core had become, prone to massive meltdowns in assets.73<\/sup><\/a> This had colossal political effects, both at home and abroad. Domestically, in the United States (as well as elsewhere), it sparked a transition from neoliberalism to neofascism. The latter was rooted in the mobilization of the lower-middle class\u2014referred to by C. Wright Mills as the \u201crearguard\u201d of the system\u2014by financial and tech capitalists at the apex of monopoly-finance capital.74<\/sup><\/a> This was manifested first in the rise of the Tea Party movement, and then in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement led by Donald Trump. Trump first entered the White House as president in 2017, with the backing of billionaires in Silicon Valley high tech, finance, and the fossil fuel industry, while relying on a base within the revanchist white lower-middle class.75<\/sup><\/a> As Kalecki had argued in the early 1960s in the time of Barry Goldwater, fascism was a \u201cdog on a leash\u201d held by the ruling class in the United States.76<\/sup><\/a> After the Great Financial Crisis that shook it to the core, the U.S. ruling class, led by its most reactionary elements, finally decided that it was time to let go of the leash.<\/p>\n

    Internationally, the Great Financial Crisis generated alarm bells of another sort. China, which, like all other countries in the world, experienced an economic decline as a result of the worldwide financial disruption, shot back up almost immediately, in a V-shaped recovery, while the West was still suffering from a deep, long-lasting downturn. This made it abundantly clear that China, with its hybrid, socialist-directed economy was relatively impervious to recessions and financial contagion, and that its economic rise was therefore virtually unstoppable. This led to Barack Obama\u2019s Pivot to Asia in 2011, followed by the launching of the New Cold War centered on China in the subsequent Trump administration. Washington decided that, having lost production hegemony, it had to use its financial and military power to rein in Beijing.77<\/sup><\/a> U.S. high tech, in particular, was threatened by China\u2019s technological prowess, particularly in artificial intelligence, endangering U.S. plans for a new \u201csurveillance capitalism.\u201d78<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The New Cold War has led to more aggressive U.S. military interventions and economic siege warfare, visible most recently in the increasing direct U.S. (and Western) support for Israel\u2019s genocide in Palestine; Washington\u2019s military abduction of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, president of Venezuela; the U.S.\/Israeli War on Iran; and the attempted economic strangulation of Cuba, along with threats of a U.S. invasion of the island. Trump\u2019s Washington is now expanding official<\/i> U.S. military spending in its 2027 Pentagon budget from nearly $1 trillion at present\u2014though the real<\/i> amount is much larger\u2014to $1.5 trillion.79<\/sup><\/a> This massive military buildup\u2014with the proposed increase<\/i> from one year to the next roughly equal to the combined military budgets of China and Russia\u2014is justified primarily in terms of a prospective \u201climited nuclear war\u201d with China over Taiwan (internationally recognized as part of China).80<\/sup><\/a> Accompanying this military buildup is a massive \u201cmodernization\u201d of the U.S. nuclear arsenal\u2014with an increase in the number of nuclear warheads no doubt to come, following the expiration in February 2026 of the New START agreement restricting nuclear weapons. Primarily as a result of U.S. aggressiveness, nuclear scientists are now reintroducing discussions of nuclear winter<\/i>\u2014the reality of the virtual annihilation of humanity on earth in the event of a general thermonuclear exchange.81<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    To be sure, there are some signs that Washington may be temporarily backing away at present from direct confrontation with China. The second Trump administration, as part of its New Cold War, introduced a 145 percent tariff on Beijing at one point in 2025. However, it was forced to retreat when China in response imposed restrictions on exports of seven heavy and medium rare earth elements\u2014samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium\u2014for which China constituted 99 percent of world supply, threatening the production of the entire U.S. high-tech sector, along with the U.S. military.82<\/sup><\/a> This retreat from an outright offensive stance, however, has simply meant that Washington is now concentrating its fire on what it sees as China\u2019s natural allies, in order to weaken it geopolitically, as part of its global imperial strategy. Washington\u2019s goal of recolonizing the world in alliance with Europe, in response to what is perceived as the growth of a multipolar world, was openly articulated by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a major address in Europe in February 2026.83<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The United States\u2014along with other leading capitalist states and multinational corporations\u2014has now effectively abandoned the energy transition aimed at displacing fossil fuels in the attempt to mitigate climate change.84<\/sup><\/a> This shift is partly due to the new hyperscale data centers being created in the race for AI dominance. One such data center, Stratos, approved for construction in Utah, will be several times the size of Manhattan, or about the size of Washington DC. It is projected to use over twice the energy currently consumed in the entire state of Utah, which has a population of three and a half million, and will require 16.6 billion gallons of water per year.85<\/sup><\/a> Trump\u2019s MAGA administration has treated climate science and science in general as the enemy, firing scientists working for the U.S. government and setting aside federal laws related to environment and health. It has eliminated the Endangerment Finding, constituting the basis of all U.S. climate legislation.86<\/sup><\/a> The Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, while greatly accelerating fossil fuel production. U.S. monopoly-finance capitalism is thus the very model today of an exterminist system<\/i>, an exterminism driven by the quest for unlimited accumulation.87<\/sup><\/a> Global average temperature continues to rise while extreme weather threatens billions of people (as well as innumerable other species on the planet). Existing trends with respect to the environment endanger human existence on Earth along multiple dimensions.88<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    A Revolution of the Earth<\/h2>\n

    Today an existential crisis is confronting humanity as a whole. In its irrational quest for accumulation as an end in itself, capital, caught in a structural crisis of its own making, is destroying both its own conditions of production and the conditions of life on the planet. As M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros said, the structural crisis of capital is universal<\/i> in character, global<\/i> in scope, extended or permanent<\/i> in time scale, and creeping<\/i>\u2014now steadily creeping<\/i>\u2014in its mode of operation. No serious observer in 2026 can deny that the present state of global capitalism conforms to this description.<\/p>\n

    Like a sorcerer whose spells are out of control, the accumulation of capital is accompanied by accumulation of catastrophe on a planetary scale. Yet, as Marx and Engels indicated in The Communist Manifesto<\/i>, capital unintentionally conjures up from the \u201cnether world,\u201d not only all manner of crises and contradictions destabilizing its rule, but also, associated with its own rise, the forces of resistance: a revolutionary proletariat. The objective basis of revolution in the twenty-first century is greatly enlarged globally, encompassing broad-based working-class communities and their environments\u2014not excluding the poor, peasants, subsistence workers, the racial and gender oppressed, the Indigenous, and others\u2014 all increasingly thrown together by the exterminist tendencies of the system. The movement toward socialism is invariably strongest in the Global South, but resistance is widening everywhere, visible in struggles of hundreds of millions of people all over the globe for human dignity, meaningful work, community, and ecology. Today a still nascent environmental proletariat is being propelled, whether consciously or not, toward the creation of an ecological civilization\u2014a new community of associated producers in full accord with the earth, rooted in substantive equality and ecological sustainability: presenting the specter of complete socialism<\/i>. The future of humanity remains open.<\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h2>\n
      \n
    1. \u21a9<\/a> Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, \u201cClosing Speech at the Sixth World Social Forum,\u201d January 27, 2006, quoted in Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, The Structural Crisis of Capital<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 140.<\/li>\n
    2. \u21a9<\/a> Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Marx\u2019s Theory of Alienation<\/cite> (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 10; Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, The Necessity of Social Control<\/cite> (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 13.<\/li>\n
    3. \u21a9<\/a> Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 680\u201381.<\/li>\n
    4. \u21a9<\/a> M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/cite>, 681\u201382.<\/li>\n
    5. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Grundrisse<\/cite> (London: Penguin, 1973), 334\u201335, 409\u201310.<\/li>\n
    6. \u21a9<\/a> See M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/cite>, 142\u2013253; Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Leviathan<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 124\u201363; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cCapitalism Has Failed\u2014What Next?<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1\u201324; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe New Irrationalism<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 74, no. 9 (February 2023): 1\u201324; Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 78, no. 2 (June 2026): 1\u201316.<\/li>\n
    7. \u21a9<\/a> Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Socialism or Barbarism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 80.<\/li>\n
    8. \u21a9<\/a> Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Critique of Leviathan: The Dialectics of the State<\/cite> (forthcoming, Monthly Review Press, 2027).<\/li>\n
    9. \u21a9<\/a> M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/cite>, 580\u2013600. For a systematic treatment of the concept of economic waste in monopoly capitalism, see Henryk Szlajfer, \u201cWaste, Marxian Theory, and Monopoly Capital: Toward a New Synthesis,\u201d in The Faltering Economy<\/a><\/cite>, eds. John Bellamy Foster and Henryk Szlajfer (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 297\u2013321.<\/li>\n
    10. \u21a9<\/a> Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, Homeland Earth<\/cite> (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1999), 73\u201375; Edgar Morin \u201cFaced with the Polycrisis Humanity Is Going Through, the First Resistance is that of the Spirit,\u201d Le Monde<\/cite>, January 24, 2024. Parts of the analysis in this and the next several paragraphs are taken from \u201cNotes from the Editors<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 6 (November 2025)\u2014drafted by the present author.<\/li>\n
    11. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cAdam Tooze,\u201d Wilson Center, wilsoncenter.org; Adam Tooze, \u201cIn Memoriam: Bruno Latour<\/a>,\u201d Chartbook 162 (blog), Substack, October 17, 2022, adamtooze.substack.com; Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World<\/cite> (New York: Viking, 2018).<\/li>\n
    12. \u21a9<\/a> Adam Tooze, \u201cPolycrisis and the Critique of Capitalocentrism<\/a>,\u201d Chartbook 343 (blog), Substack, January 6, 2025, adamtooze.substack.com.<\/li>\n
    13. \u21a9<\/a> For Latour\u2019s denial of critique see \u201cWhy Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/cite> 30, no. 2 (2024): 225\u201348; Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods<\/cite> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 9\u201312.<\/li>\n
    14. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 98.<\/li>\n
    15. \u21a9<\/a> Louis Delannoy, Jean-Charles Leveugle, Sofia Manitakou, and Peter S\u00f8gaard J\u00f8rgensen, \u201cMore than a Buzzword?: Mapping Interpretations of the \u2018Polycrisis,\u2019<\/a>\u201d Sustainability Science<\/cite> 21 (December 29, 2025): 1177\u201391.<\/li>\n
    16. \u21a9<\/a> Simon Torkington, \u201cWe\u2019re on the Brink of a \u2018Polycrisis\u2019\u2014How Worried Should We Be?,\u201d World Economic Forum, January 13, 2023, weforum.org; World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2023<\/cite>, January 11, 2023.<\/li>\n
    17. \u21a9<\/a> World Bank, Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024: Pathways Out of the Polycrisis<\/cite> (Washington DC: World Bank, 2024), xxiii\u2014xxvi, 4, 190.<\/li>\n
    18. \u21a9<\/a> Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, States of Fragility 2025<\/cite>, January 18, 2025, 29, 172, 177.<\/li>\n
    19. \u21a9<\/a> William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes<\/cite> (London: Penguin, 1996), 488\u2014see also 42\u201344, 110, 422, 521; \u201cCapitalism,\u201d Oxford English Dictionary: The Compact Edition<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. 1, 334; John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 15\u201316. The emphasis on capital rather than capitalism in Marx\u2019s work is of more than minor significance. For Marx, the focus is on capital<\/cite> as a system of self-expanding value, propelled by the logic of accumulation. Although the original conception of capitalism took this form, its meaning was later converted in the dominant ideology to a much more amorphous and meaningless conception of the \u201cmarket system,\u201d which led in the end to the substitution of the notion of the market system or simply the market for the notion of capitalism itself, what John Kenneth Galbraith was to call a not so \u201cinnocent fraud.\u201d In M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019s work, the emphasis on capital<\/cite> is retained to the point that he argued that Soviet-type societies were postcapitalist<\/cite> but nonetheless had not escaped the capital system<\/cite> in its entirety, resulting in the contradictory character and ultimate failure of these societies. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud<\/cite> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/cite>, xxi; M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, The Structural Crisis of Capital<\/cite>, 95.<\/li>\n
    20. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto<\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 13.<\/li>\n
    21. \u21a9<\/a> Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays<\/cite> (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Press, 1951), 292.<\/li>\n
    22. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto<\/cite>, 7. See also Harry Magdoff, \u201cA Note on The Communist Manifesto<\/cite><\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 50, no. 1 (May 1998): 11\u201313.<\/li>\n
    23. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Marx on Globalisation<\/cite>, ed. Dave Renton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001). Focusing solely on Marx and Engels\u2019s panegyric to the bourgeoisie, and thus of the drive to capital accumulation, has led some thinkers mistakenly to conclude that this signified support for a mechanistic \u201cPrometheanism\u201d in which the development of the means of production and industrialization constituted the ultimate goal of society. On the ecological aspects of The Communist Manifesto<\/cite>, countering the view of it as a mechanistic \u201cPromethean\u201d argument, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 213\u201332. On the concept of Prometheanism in Marxism, see John Bellamy Foster, \u201cEcological Marxism and Prometheus Unbound<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 6 (November 2025): 1\u201317.<\/li>\n
    24. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto<\/cite>, 11.<\/li>\n
    25. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works<\/cite> (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 1, 185, 190. Marx\u2019s attraction to Lucian was due in part to the latter\u2019s strong identification with Epicurean materialism, which gave a biting, anti-mystical character to his satire. See John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), 113\u201314, 223\u201324.<\/li>\n
    26. \u21a9<\/a> Lucian, Lucian<\/cite>, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1921), 371\u201381.<\/li>\n
    27. \u21a9<\/a> Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Goethe Treasury: Selected Prose and Poetry<\/cite>, ed. Thomas Mann (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 26\u201329.<\/li>\n
    28. \u21a9<\/a> Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle<\/cite>, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 10 (1253b).<\/li>\n
    29. \u21a9<\/a> Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos<\/cite> (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).<\/li>\n
    30. \u21a9<\/a> Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).<\/li>\n
    31. \u21a9<\/a> Robert L. Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism<\/cite> (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 53\u201377; Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 153\u201362; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 247\u201357.<\/li>\n
    32. \u21a9<\/a> Marx Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 711, 742. Note: The Ben Fowkes translation refers here to \u201cself-valorizing value.\u201d<\/li>\n
    33. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 779\u201380.<\/li>\n
    34. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 638.<\/li>\n
    35. \u21a9<\/a> William McNeill, The Global Condition<\/cite> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 135\u201349; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cCapitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1\u20133.<\/li>\n
    36. \u21a9<\/a> M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/cite>, 142\u2013253.<\/li>\n
    37. \u21a9<\/a> J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration<\/cite> (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 38\u201347; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 13\u201319.<\/li>\n
    38. \u21a9<\/a> Stockholm Resilience Center, \u201cPlanetary Boundaries: The Safe Operating Space for Humanity<\/a>,\u201d n.d., stockholmresilience.org.<\/li>\n
    39. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 108.<\/li>\n
    40. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx\u2019s Ecology<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141\u201377.<\/li>\n
    41. \u21a9<\/a> Ian Angus, Metabolic Rifts<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026).<\/li>\n
    42. \u21a9<\/a> Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); Richard Levins, \u201cIs Capitalism a Disease?<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 52, no. 4 (September 2000): 8\u201333.<\/li>\n
    43. \u21a9<\/a> Charles H. Hewison, Locomotive Boiler Explosions<\/cite> (Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1983); Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 145\u201346, 153, 270; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142.<\/li>\n
    44. \u21a9<\/a> This and the following two paragraphs draw on Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 36\u201340.<\/li>\n
    45. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1978), 444.<\/li>\n
    46. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 871\u201374; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 20, 129; Ian Angus, \u201cThe Meaning of \u2018So-Called Primitive Accumulation<\/a>,’\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 74, no. 11 (April 2023): 54\u201358.<\/li>\n
    47. \u21a9<\/a> Thomas R. Navin and Marian V. Sears, \u201cThe Rise of a Market for Industrial Securities, 1887\u20131902,\u201d Business History Review<\/cite> 29, no. 2 (June 1955): 105\u201338. For a historical treatment of the rise of monopoly capital in the United States, including the role of finance in the process, see Richard B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power<\/cite> (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989). For a critical response to the current rejection of the notion of monopoly capitalism in some fundamentalist Marxist circles, see Editors, \u201cNotes from the Editors<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 78, no. 2 (June 2026).<\/li>\n
    48. \u21a9<\/a> Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism<\/cite>, 36.<\/li>\n
    49. \u21a9<\/a> The theory of oligopolistic pricing was first developed by Sweezy in his \u201ckinked-demand curve theory.\u201d Paul M. Sweezy, \u201cDemand Under Conditions of Oligopoly,\u201d Journal of Political Economy<\/cite> 47, no. 4 (1939): 568\u201373. See also Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 15\u201320.<\/li>\n
    50. \u21a9<\/a> On real unemployment, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), 24\u201325.<\/li>\n
    51. \u21a9<\/a> Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development<\/cite> (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism <\/cite>(New York: International Publishers, 1939); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise<\/cite> (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1904); Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times<\/cite> (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923).<\/li>\n
    52. \u21a9<\/a> Lenin, Imperialism<\/cite>, 81\u201382.<\/li>\n
    53. \u21a9<\/a> Lenin, Imperialism<\/cite>, 88.<\/li>\n
    54. \u21a9<\/a> V. I. Lenin, Collected Works<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 30, 151, 158.<\/li>\n
    55. \u21a9<\/a> Lenin, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 21, 409; Lenin, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 23, 110, 115; Lenin, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 39, 736\u201338; J. M. Blaut, \u201cEvaluating Imperialism,\u201d Science & Society<\/cite> 61, no. 3 (Fall 1997), 382\u201391; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe New Denial of Imperialism on the Left<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 2\u20138.<\/li>\n
    56. \u21a9<\/a> Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), vii.<\/li>\n
    57. \u21a9<\/a> See L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age<\/cite> (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981).<\/li>\n
    58. \u21a9<\/a> Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 178\u201386.<\/li>\n
    59. \u21a9<\/a> Baran, The Political Economy of Growth<\/cite>, 268.<\/li>\n
    60. \u21a9<\/a> James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century<\/cite> (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005).<\/li>\n
    61. \u21a9<\/a> Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital<\/cite>. Baran died in 1964, two years before the book was published. See also John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014 [1986]); Jan Toporowski, \u201cKalecki and Steindl in the Transition to \u2018Monopoly Capital<\/a>,’\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 68, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2016): 39\u201348; Ramaa Vasudevan, \u201cDigital Platforms: Monopoly Capital Through a Classical-Marxian Lens,\u201d Cambridge Journal of Economics<\/cite> 46 (2022): 1269\u201388. In an article that is extremely valuable overall in its development of an analysis of what could be called \u201creal monopoly,\u201d building on both Marx\u2019s classical writings and the monopoly capital theory of Baran, Sweezy, and others, Vasudevan states at one point (1276)\u2014drawing on the interpretations of critics of monopoly-capital theory such as Anwar Shaikh and John Weeks\u2014that \u201cthe monopoly-capital school\u201d sees certain modern developments, such as the sales effort, as \u201ca suspension or invalidation of Marx\u2019s theory of value and competition.\u201d However, as Sweezy pointed out, it never occurred to either Baran or himself to abandon Marxian value theory. Rather, they thought that the workings of the laws of value and monopoly were merely modified<\/cite> in significant ways under monopoly capital. See Paul M. Sweezy, \u201cMonopoly Capital and the Theory of Value,\u201d in Foster and Szlajfer, eds., The Faltering Economy<\/cite>, 25\u201326; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cA Missing Chapter of \u2018Monopoly Capital\u2019: Introduction to Baran and Sweezy\u2019s \u2018Some Theoretical Implications<\/a>,’\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 64, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2012): 17\u201321.<\/li>\n
    62. \u21a9<\/a> Financial expansion as a means of propelling the system was not emphasized in Monopoly Capital<\/cite> but nevertheless was singled out in a separate section in the chapter on the sales effort. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital<\/cite>, 139\u201341.<\/li>\n
    63. \u21a9<\/a> Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital<\/cite>, 336\u201367. On the critique of the cultural apparatus under monopoly capitalism, see Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, \u201cThe Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 65, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2013): 43\u201364.<\/li>\n
    64. \u21a9<\/a> Stephen Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).<\/li>\n
    65. \u21a9<\/a> Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). See also Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2013); Jan Toporowski, \u201cThe Wisdom of Property and the Politics of the Middle Classes<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 62, no. 4 (September 2010): 10\u201315.<\/li>\n
    66. \u21a9<\/a> Paul M. Sweezy, \u201cThe Triumph of Financial Capital<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 46, no. 2 (June 1994): 1\u201311; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cMonopoly-Finance Capital<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 58, no. 7 (December 2006): 1\u201314.<\/li>\n
    67. \u21a9<\/a> Magdoff and Foster, Grand Theft Capital<\/cite>.<\/li>\n
    68. \u21a9<\/a> Bernie Sanders, The Big Tech Oligarchs\u2019 War Against Workers: AI and Automation Could Destroy Nearly 100 Million U.S. Jobs in a Decade<\/cite>, Ranking Member Minority Staff Report, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Washington DC, October 6, 2025.<\/li>\n
    69. \u21a9<\/a> See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), xxxiii\u2013lxii; Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).<\/li>\n
    70. \u21a9<\/a> Felix Richter, \u201cChina Is the World\u2019s Manufacturing Superpower<\/a>,\u201d Statista, April 16, 2025, statista.com; Roland Rajah and Ahmed Albayrak, \u201cChina versus America on Global Trade<\/a>,\u201d Lowy Institute, January 2025, interactives.lowyinstitute.org.<\/li>\n
    71. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).<\/li>\n
    72. \u21a9<\/a> Thomas I. Palley, \u201cThe War in Ukraine\u2014A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 2 (June 2025): 27\u201347; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 75, no. 9 (February 2024): 1\u201321.<\/li>\n
    73. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).<\/li>\n
    74. \u21a9<\/a> C. Wright Mills, White Collar<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 353\u201354.<\/li>\n
    75. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).<\/li>\n
    76. \u21a9<\/a> Micha\u0142 Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 104; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 1 (May 2025): 1\u201324; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 2 (June 2025): 1\u201325.<\/li>\n
    77. \u21a9<\/a> See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, \u201cImperialism in the Indo-Pacific\u2014An Introduction<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 76, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2024): 6\u201313; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy<\/cite> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37\u201346.<\/li>\n
    78. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, \u201cSurveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 66, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2014): 1\u201331.<\/li>\n
    79. \u21a9<\/a> Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, \u201cActual U.S. Military Spending Reached $1.53 Trillion in 2022\u2014More Than Twice Acknowledged Level<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 75, no. 6 (November 2023): 18\u201326; C. Todd Lopez, \u201c$1.5 Trillion Budget Request Prioritizes Service Members, Modernization<\/a>,\u201d U.S. Department of War, April 21, 2026, war.gov.<\/li>\n
    80. \u21a9<\/a> Xiao Liang et al., \u201cTrends in World Military Expenditure 2025<\/a>,\u201d SIPRI, April 2026, sipri.org; Foster, \u201cThe U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy.\u201d<\/li>\n
    81. \u21a9<\/a> Owen Brian Toon and Alan Robock, Earth in Flames<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). See also the series on nuclear winter launched by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists<\/cite> in May 2026.<\/li>\n
    82. \u21a9<\/a> Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz, \u201cThe Consequences of China\u2019s New Rare Earths Export Restrictions<\/a>,\u201d Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 14, 2025, csis.org.<\/li>\n
    83. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cS. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at Munich Security Conference<\/a>,\u201d February 14, 2026, state.gov. On the nature of economic recolonization in our time, see Prabhat Patnaik, \u201cOn the Economic Crisis of Capitalism,\u201d in this issue.<\/li>\n
    84. \u21a9<\/a> See Editors, \u201cNotes from the Editors<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 76, no. 10 (March 2025).<\/li>\n
    85. \u21a9<\/a> Devin B. Martinez, \u201cA Massive AI Data Center Transforms Utah into a National Flashpoint<\/a>,\u201d People\u2019s Dispatch, May 9, 2026, peoplesdispatch.org.<\/li>\n
    86. \u21a9<\/a> Editors, \u201cNotes from the Editors<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 77, no. 11 (April 2026); Clark and Foster, \u201cThe Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States.\u201d<\/li>\n
    87. \u21a9<\/a> On the concept of exterminism see E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War<\/cite> (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41\u201379. See also Edward Thompson et al., Exterminism and Cold War<\/cite> (London: Verso, 1982); Rudolf Bahro, Avoiding Social and Economic Disaster<\/cite> (Bath: Gateway Books, 1994), 19\u201325; John Bellamy Foster, \u201c\u2018Notes on Exterminism\u2019 for the Twenty-First Century Ecology and Peace Movements<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 74, no. 1 (May 2022): 1\u201317.<\/li>\n
    88. \u21a9<\/a> United Nations Environmental Programme, Global Environment Outlook 7: A Future We Choose<\/cite>, December 9, 2025, 503\u201331.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      ___________________________________________<\/p>\n

      Issue:\u00a0Vol. 78, No. 03 (July-August 2026)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/a> John Bellamy Foster is a North American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the <\/span><\/em>Monthly Review<\/span>. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

      Go to Original \u2013 monthlyreview.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      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\u2014with globe-spanning consequences. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":175112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[232,1982,354,289,542,2366,1022,3530,3695,545,1983,2198,874],"class_list":["post-319174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism","tag-capitalism","tag-economic-crisis","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-fascism","tag-liberalism","tag-marxism","tag-military-capitalism","tag-monopoly-capitalism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-political-economy","tag-post-capitalism","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319176,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319174\/revisions\/319176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}