John Bellamy Foster apresenta nossa edição especial de verão sobre a "Crise Estrutural do Capital", esclarecendo suas quatro características principais, conforme delineadas originalmente por István Mészáros em A Teoria da Alienação em Marx. O capital, afirma Foster, encontra-se em uma situação semelhante à do aprendiz de feiticeiro de Luciano: tentando inutilmente controlar um sistema fora de controle que ele próprio criou, acumulando não apenas contradições, mas uma verdadeira catástrofe — com consequências de alcance global.
John Bellamy Foster
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| Vol. 78, No. 03 (July-August 2026) |
Creio que não nos cabe falar em termos de séculos futuros... não temos tempo a perder; o desafio é salvar as condições de vida neste planeta, salvar a espécie humana, mudar o curso da história, mudar o mundo.—Hugo Chávez1
A noção de uma “crise estrutural global do capital” definidora de nossa época foi introduzida pela primeira vez por István Mészáros na terceira edição de sua obra A Teoria da Alienação em Marx, em 1971, e em sua conferência Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, intitulada “A Necessidade do Controle Social”, naquele mesmo ano.2 Em 1995, na obra Para Além do Capital, Mészáros distinguiu a crise estrutural do capital — de caráter epocal e em emergência — das crises cíclicas e conjunturais que constituem o “modo natural de existência do capital”. A crise estrutural atual, explicou ele, apresenta quatro características que a distinguem historicamente, focando-se aqui principalmente em suas dimensões econômicas:
- Seu caráter é universal, em vez de restrito a uma esfera específica (por exemplo, financeira ou comercial, ou afetando este ou aquele ramo específico da produção, ou aplicando-se a este ou aquele tipo de trabalho, com sua gama específica de habilidades e graus de produtividade, e assim por diante).
- Seu alcance é verdadeiramente global (no sentido mais ameaçadoramente literal do termo), em vez de confinado a um conjunto específico de países (como todas as grandes crises foram no passado).
- Sua escala de tempo é extensa, contínua — se preferir: permanente — em vez de limitada e cíclica, como todas as crises de capital anteriores.
- Seu modo de desenvolvimento pode ser chamado de gradual — em contraste com as erupções e colapsos mais espetaculares e dramáticos do passado — acrescentando-se a ressalva de que mesmo as convulsões mais veementes e violentas não podem ser excluídas no que diz respeito ao futuro: isto é, quando a complexa maquinaria agora ativamente engajada na “gestão de crises” e no “deslocamento” mais ou menos temporário das crescentes contradições perder o fôlego.3
Tudo isso indica que o atual modo de produção se aproxima dos limites absolutos de seu modo de reprodução metabólico-social, o que se manifesta não apenas em suas crescentes contradições econômicas — visto que a produção, o consumo e a circulação definem sua estrutura interna —, mas também em todos os aspectos da realidade material. Uma crise estrutural ocorre quando não estão em questão apenas os “limites imediatos” do sistema, mas também os seus “limites últimos”, uma vez que isso afeta “a totalidade de um complexo social”.4 Isso é particularmente evidente na esfera ambiental: em sua busca por acumulação incessante, o capital trata o meio ambiente como um conjunto de meras barreiras a serem superadas ou como depósito para seus resíduos, em vez de respeitar os limites planetários e as leis naturais.5
A crise estrutural do capital reflete-se em perturbações crônicas e falhas sistêmicas em todos os aspectos da reprodução metabólico-social — não apenas no que diz respeito às condições materiais imediatas (sejam econômicas ou ecológicas), mas também envolvendo relações de classe e propriedade, o Estado, as relações de família e gênero, bem como as estruturas de controle racial e racista endêmicas ao capitalismo e consolidadas ao longo dos séculos. A desestabilização da totalidade do complexo social estende-se à destruição de uma cultura unificada e dos meios da razão — fenômenos refletidos no crescimento do irracionalismo e no ressurgimento de forças regressivas.6
O aprofundamento das contradições da ordem metabólico-social do capital será, em última análise, decidido no âmbito do sistema mundial imperialista. A divisão da economia capitalista mundial em Estados-nação concorrentes é uma característica insuperável do sistema. Em 2001, na obra *Socialismo ou Barbárie*, Mészáros escreveu que o mundo enfrentava, então, “a fase potencialmente mais letal do imperialismo”, à medida que os Estados Unidos buscavam manter e até ampliar sua hegemonia global em um contexto de enfraquecimento da ordem econômica mundial, recorrendo cada vez mais a meios militares e outras formas de coerção. Isso levantava a possibilidade de uma guerra permanente que poderia culminar em um conflito nuclear, caso não se encontrasse um caminho revolucionário e socialista para além do capital. Ele seguiu a perspectiva de Rosa Luxemburgo ao afirmar que nos deparamos com uma escolha entre “socialismo ou barbárie” — acrescentando, porém, uma ressalva: “barbárie, se tivermos sorte”. Isso significava que, nos dias de hoje, a barbárie poderia facilmente levar ao “extermínio da humanidade”, seja por meio de um conflito termonuclear generalizado ou de uma crise ecológica planetária. Assim, ressaltou-se toda a gravidade da crise estrutural de época que a humanidade enfrenta.7
Na visão de Mészáros, o capitalismo monopolista assumiu, de forma crescente, a feição de um “capitalismo de gângsteres”, em virtude da enorme e crescente concentração e centralização do capital e da consequente perda de controle social por parte do Estado, ao passo que as medidas corretivas habituais do sistema se mostravam cada vez mais ineficazes.8 A ordem capitalista mundial tornou-se crescentemente dependente de aventuras militares e financeiras — o que reflete, acima de tudo, o fato de que o centro não mais se sustenta. A superacumulação, o excesso de capacidade e o desperdício passaram a caracterizar todo o sistema.9
Shallow Syncretism as a Form of Denialism
Naturally, given a global structural crisis of capital of the kind that Mészáros described, one could expect that today’s 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, or multiple crises coming from all directions, constituting an assemblage of crises, conceived in Latourian, posthumanist terms, lacking any integral connection. A fundamental rule determining the now prevailing “polycrisis” 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.
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’s book, Homeland Earth, polycrisis was introduced as a category meant to negate the notion that it was possible to “single out a number one problem to which all others would be subordinated” or even to construct a hierarchy of critical problems in the world. Capitalism is almost completely absent from Morin’s reactionary Cold War/post-Cold War frame. All problems are associated vaguely with modernity or “technoscience,” 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 “spirit,” which he refers to as the “first resistance”).10
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, is a columnist for the prominent U.S. New Cold War organ Foreign Policy, and has “contributed” to the U.S. National Intelligence Council, part of the U.S. national security apparatus. He describes himself today as a “Latourian left liberal.”11 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:
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 “capitalocene”…. 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
For Tooze, those in the Marxian tradition who focus on the global structural crisis of capital (referred to superciliously here as “the bold new certainties of the ‘capitalocene'”) “underestimate the scale of the mess” the world is confronting. His stated preference for polycrisis as “a weak theory”—in line with the posthumanist philosophy of Bruno Latour—conceives it as having the advantage of lacking clarity, representing a conglomeration of “underspecified” crises that accurately reflect the uncertainty, confusion, and paralysis of our times.13 At best, he offers what Karl Marx referred to as a “shallow syncretism” as a substitute for a materialist, historical, and dialectical analysis aimed at confronting the burgeoning contradictions of capital.14 His analysis has been characterized in the literature as phenomenological, focusing on interactions and thick descriptions, while neglecting causality.15
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 “We’re on the Brink of a ‘Polycrisis’—How Worried Should We Be?,” 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’s 2023 Global Risks Report focusing on the polycrisis.16
A parallel result can be found in the World Bank’s 2024 report, Pathways Out of the Polycrisis. Careful readers of the report will find only the vaguest accounts of the “polycrisis” and no genuine “pathways out.” Here the polycrisis is primarily significant for its effects on the economy and is thus blamed for “slow growth prospects and high levels of debt,” together with increased economic “uncertainty, fragility, and polarization.” In the World Bank’s most concrete definition, we are told that a “polycrisis refers to multiple interconnected crises occurring simultaneously, where the interactions amplify the overall impact.” Significantly, there is no reference to capitalism, or to capital as a governing social relation, anywhere in the World Bank’s report on the polycrisis.17
The OECD addresses polycrisis in its 2025 States of Fragility report. We are informed of “the increasing prevalence of polycrises—a confluence of global challenges—[that] disproportionately impact conflict-affected countries, already grappling with significant vulnerabilities” and bearing the brunt of “cascading crises.” The answer is a “paradigm shift” at the level of ideas emphasizing a whole “fragility spectrum,” requiring increased “resilience”— 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 “authoritarian capitalism” and “crony capitalism” are derided in the report.18
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’s multifaceted global malaise is the structural crisis of late-stage (monopoly) capitalism.
The Sorcerer’s Out of Control Spells
It is one of those ironies of history that the concepts of socialism and communism antedate that of capitalism. Thus, in The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Frederick Engels, there is no mention of capitalism, a word that first arose in English in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes (serialized in 1853–1855)—with 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 [1867]).19 Instead, Marx and Engels in the Manifesto wrote about the rising class of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), identifying this class directly with capital as a social relation.20
Part One of the Manifesto, entitled “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” consists of two sections. A little less than half of Part One is devoted to what Joseph Schumpeter was to characterize as a “panegyric upon bourgeois achievement that has no equal in economic literature.”21 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 have been quoted more in recent decades than the statement: “The 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.”22 Passages like this have led to the designation of Marx and Engels as the first theorists of globalization.23
Nevertheless, the panegyric ends around halfway through Part One of the Manifesto, beginning with the sentences: “A 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.”24 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 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 “nether world” it had conjured up—marking the transition point in Part One of the Manifesto.
At least from the time he wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus’s materialist philosophy, Marx was drawn to the work of the great Greek satirist Lucian (born c. 117 CE).25 In his dialogue “The Lover of Lies,” Lucian told the story of a sorcerer’s apprentice, who had watched on repeated occasions his master’s 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—everything that a slave would normally be required to do. In his master’s 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’s apprentice could not get it to stop or turn it into a pestle again. Instead, it kept on bringing water, flooding the house by “pouring it in.” 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 Lucian’s story was taken up by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in early nineteenth-century Germany in his ballad “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” though there the spell is cast on broomsticks, the jars are buckets, while the uncontrollable waters “rush in with roar and clatter.”27
If Lucian and Goethe were Marx and Engels’s inspiration for their allegory, there is in the Manifesto no all-powerful sorcerer present to reverse the apprentice’s uncontrolled spells. Rather, the sorcerer’s 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 “the powers of the nether world,” 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
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 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—only to be replaced by evermore coercive and ineffective mechanisms that multiply the state of disorder, generating an “empire of chaos.”30
What has been called “the regime of capital” can be seen in Marx’s general formula for capital, M–C–M′, where M stands for money, C for Commodities, and M′ for M plus Δm, 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′–C–M′′ in the second year, M′′–C–M′′′ in the third year, and so on, in successive years.31 This is what Marx meant in referring to capital as “self-expanding value.” “Accumulate, Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”—for capital.32 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 “the twinkling of an eye.”33
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—insofar as the accumulation process is functioning properly—invest this surplus in the further expansion of production. Yet, accumulation through exploitation of workers in production is also invariably accompanied by a wider process of expropriation built on robbing both labor and nature, which further contributes to the amassing of wealth. What Marx called “the negative, i.e. destructive side” of capital’s interaction with nature “from the point of view of natural science” is therefore constantly present as the underside of the accumulation process.34 The accumulation of capital is invariably accompanied by the accumulation of catastrophe—both actual and potential.
Here it is useful to examine what world-historian William McNeill in The Global Condition (1992) called the law of the “conservation of catastrophe.” McNeill applied this to ecological crisis in particular, arguing that “catastrophe is the underside of the human condition—a 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.” 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 “recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.”35 The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved, but can be said—taking into account capital’s drive to endless exponential accumulation—to be cumulative, reappearing in ever more colossal forms in an increasingly alienated environment.
In many respects, capital has reached the point of the activation of its “absolute limits,” as a viable mode of social metabolic reproduction.36 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 Seven of the planetary boundaries that define a safe planetary environment for humanity have now been crossed.38 Today, the scale of human economic processes rivals the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, opening up the possibility of multiple catastrophic events.39 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.
In Capital, Marx addressed capital’s generation of an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” namely, the metabolic rift.40 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 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—a warning of similar developments in the future.42
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 “a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open.” Capital’s inability to control “the productive forces, which have grown beyond its power,” including the destructive effects imposed on its natural and social environs, was “driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.”43
Capitalist Maturity and Structural Crisis
The global structural crisis of capital in our times is not simply an abstract product of capital’s 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 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 in the original sense of handicraft production organized into a factory system, allowing for the development of the division of labor—as explained by Adam Smith at the outset of The Wealth of Nations. Under mercantilism, what Marx in his reproduction schemes in the second volume of Capital called Department I (producing means of production)—as opposed to Department II (producing means of consumption)—was still small, both absolutely and in relation to the economy as a whole.45 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—a process inseparable from capitalism from its inception.
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 “original accumulation,” and what Marx, far more critically, referred to as “so-called primitive [original] accumulation”—or, more exactly, as “original expropriation.”46 This was the age of “modern industry” or machinofacture, as opposed to manufacture. 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, “ruled the waves,” establishing itself as the hegemonic capitalist power with a vast colonial system from which it extracted surplus.
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 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 “a tendency to overaccumulation” 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
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—up.49 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
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’s Finance Capital (1910), V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), and Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (1923).51 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 (as distinct from imperialism in a more general sense, which, for Lenin, embraced colonialism and existed throughout the history of capitalism).52 “If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,” he wrote, “we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”53 Lenin’s 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 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 “the economic and political essence of imperialism,” that is, the division of the world into “oppressor” and “oppressed” countries, from which the imperialist nations and their monopolistic corporations extracted “superprofits.” The key to revolution, he contended, had shifted from the imperial center to the periphery of the system.55
Following the Second World War the United States emerged as the unrivaled hegemonic power of the capitalist system. The other great imperial powers—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—had all been devastated in the war. The United States aided in their reconstruction, relegating them—as Paul A. Baran noted in The Political Economy of Growth (1957)—to the status of “junior partners” in the U.S. imperium.56 Today the United States and its junior partners in the historical “great powers” plus Canada, make up the G7, which constitutes the ruling core of the imperialist world system, with Washington at its head.
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 All seven members of today’s G7 engaged in military interventions in Soviet Russia—either 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—which was won in Europe almost entirely by the Red Army standing alone—as 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 “containment” of the Soviet Union (which was dedicated to “socialism in one country”).58 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 “siphoning off” of economic surplus from the periphery.59
The Long Emergency60
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 Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, wrote Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order.61 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 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 “irrational system,” 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—with 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
In the early 1970s, a few years after Baran and Sweezy’s 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—marked by two major regional wars in Asia—had 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—also 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 “golden age of capitalism.”64
Already in the 1970s, and much more pronounced in the ’80s, 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 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, or the merging of monopoly capital based in production with financialization.66 All aspects of social existence and livelihood—health care, insurance, education, pensions, housing, transportation, and communication—were 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 “affordability crisis” as monopoly-finance capital seeks to use every means possible to take from the poor and give to the rich.67 AI capital consisting of “hyperscalers” 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
Faced with economic slowdown in the late 1960s and early ’70s, 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’s presidency, Washington initiated the opening up of the capitalist world economy to China, sparking Beijing’s 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 (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 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’s countries now trade more with China than the United States—even though the former is still a poor country in per capita terms, with wages far below those of the core capitalist countries.70
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 “naked imperialism” 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 Washington unleashed an unprecedented set of military interventions designed to restore its weakening economic hegemony and to establish itself as the de facto 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
The Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, 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 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—referred to by C. Wright Mills as the “rearguard” of the system—by financial and tech capitalists at the apex of monopoly-finance capital.74 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 As Kalecki had argued in the early 1960s in the time of Barry Goldwater, fascism was a “dog on a leash” held by the ruling class in the United States.76 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.
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’s 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 U.S. high tech, in particular, was threatened by China’s technological prowess, particularly in artificial intelligence, endangering U.S. plans for a new “surveillance capitalism.”78
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’s genocide in Palestine; Washington’s military abduction of Nicolás 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’s Washington is now expanding official U.S. military spending in its 2027 Pentagon budget from nearly $1 trillion at present—though the real amount is much larger—to $1.5 trillion.79 This massive military buildup—with the proposed increase from one year to the next roughly equal to the combined military budgets of China and Russia—is justified primarily in terms of a prospective “limited nuclear war” with China over Taiwan (internationally recognized as part of China).80 Accompanying this military buildup is a massive “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal—with 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—the reality of the virtual annihilation of humanity on earth in the event of a general thermonuclear exchange.81
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—samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium—for 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 This retreat from an outright offensive stance, however, has simply meant that Washington is now concentrating its fire on what it sees as China’s natural allies, in order to weaken it geopolitically, as part of its global imperial strategy. Washington’s 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
The United States—along with other leading capitalist states and multinational corporations—has now effectively abandoned the energy transition aimed at displacing fossil fuels in the attempt to mitigate climate change.84 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 Trump’s 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 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, an exterminism driven by the quest for unlimited accumulation.87 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
A Revolution of the Earth
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 Mészáros said, the structural crisis of capital is universal in character, global in scope, extended or permanent in time scale, and creeping—now steadily creeping—in its mode of operation. No serious observer in 2026 can deny that the present state of global capitalism conforms to this description.
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, capital unintentionally conjures up from the “nether world,” 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—not excluding the poor, peasants, subsistence workers, the racial and gender oppressed, the Indigenous, and others— 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—a new community of associated producers in full accord with the earth, rooted in substantive equality and ecological sustainability: presenting the specter of complete socialism. The future of humanity remains open.
Notes
1 Hugo Chávez, “Closing Speech at the Sixth World Social Forum,” January 27, 2006, quoted in István Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 140.
2 István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 10; István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 13.
3 István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 680–81.
4 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 681–82.
5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 334–35, 409–10.
6 See Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 142–253; István Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 124–63; John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1–24; John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74, no. 9 (February 2023): 1–24; Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “The Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States,” Monthly Review 78, no. 2 (June 2026): 1–16.
7 István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 80.
8 István Mészáros, Critique of Leviathan: The Dialectics of the State (forthcoming, Monthly Review Press, 2027).
9 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 580–600. For a systematic treatment of the concept of economic waste in monopoly capitalism, see Henryk Szlajfer, “Waste, Marxian Theory, and Monopoly Capital: Toward a New Synthesis,” in The Faltering Economy, eds. John Bellamy Foster and Henryk Szlajfer (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 297–321.
10 Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, Homeland Earth (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1999), 73–75; Edgar Morin “Faced with the Polycrisis Humanity Is Going Through, the First Resistance is that of the Spirit,” Le Monde, January 24, 2024. Parts of the analysis in this and the next several paragraphs are taken from “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 77, no. 6 (November 2025)—drafted by the present author.
11 “Adam Tooze,” Wilson Center, wilsoncenter.org; Adam Tooze, “In Memoriam: Bruno Latour,” Chartbook 162 (blog), Substack, October 17, 2022, adamtooze.substack.com; Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018).
12 Adam Tooze, “Polycrisis and the Critique of Capitalocentrism,” Chartbook 343 (blog), Substack, January 6, 2025, adamtooze.substack.com.
13 For Latour’s denial of critique see “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2024): 225–48; Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 9–12.
14 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 98.
15 Louis Delannoy, Jean-Charles Leveugle, Sofia Manitakou, and Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, “More than a Buzzword?: Mapping Interpretations of the ‘Polycrisis,’” Sustainability Science 21 (December 29, 2025): 1177–91.
16 Simon Torkington, “We’re on the Brink of a ‘Polycrisis’—How Worried Should We Be?,” World Economic Forum, January 13, 2023, weforum.org; World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2023, January 11, 2023.
17 World Bank, Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024: Pathways Out of the Polycrisis (Washington DC: World Bank, 2024), xxiii—xxvi, 4, 190.
18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, States of Fragility 2025, January 18, 2025, 29, 172, 177.
19 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes (London: Penguin, 1996), 488—see also 42–44, 110, 422, 521; “Capitalism,” Oxford English Dictionary: The Compact Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. 1, 334; John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 15–16. The emphasis on capital rather than capitalism in Marx’s work is of more than minor significance. For Marx, the focus is on capital 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 “market system,” 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 “innocent fraud.” In Mészáros’s work, the emphasis on capital is retained to the point that he argued that Soviet-type societies were postcapitalist but nonetheless had not escaped the capital system in its entirety, resulting in the contradictory character and ultimate failure of these societies. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Mészáros, Beyond Capital, xxi; Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 95.
20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 13.
21 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Press, 1951), 292.
22 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 7. See also Harry Magdoff, “A Note on The Communist Manifesto,” Monthly Review 50, no. 1 (May 1998): 11–13.
23 Karl Marx, Marx on Globalisation, ed. Dave Renton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001). Focusing solely on Marx and Engels’s 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 “Prometheanism” 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, countering the view of it as a mechanistic “Promethean” argument, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 213–32. On the concept of Prometheanism in Marxism, see John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Marxism and Prometheus Unbound,” Monthly Review 77, no. 6 (November 2025): 1–17.
24 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 11.
25 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 1, 185, 190. Marx’s attraction to Lucian was due in part to the latter’s 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 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), 113–14, 223–24.
26 Lucian, Lucian, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1921), 371–81.
27 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Goethe Treasury: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Thomas Mann (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 26–29.
28 Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 10 (1253b).
29 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).
30 Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
31 Robert L. Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 53–77; Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 153–62; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 247–57.
32 Marx Capital, vol. 1, 711, 742. Note: The Ben Fowkes translation refers here to “self-valorizing value.”
33 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 779–80.
34 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 638.
35 William McNeill, The Global Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 135–49; John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–3.
36 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 142–253.
37 J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 38–47; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 13–19.
38 Stockholm Resilience Center, “Planetary Boundaries: The Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” n.d., stockholmresilience.org.
39 John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 108.
40 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141–77.
41 Ian Angus, Metabolic Rifts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026).
42 Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); Richard Levins, “Is Capitalism a Disease?,” Monthly Review 52, no. 4 (September 2000): 8–33.
43 Charles H. Hewison, Locomotive Boiler Explosions (Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1983); Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 145–46, 153, 270; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142.
44 This and the following two paragraphs draw on Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 36–40.
45 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1978), 444.
46 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 871–74; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20, 129; Ian Angus, “The Meaning of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation,'” Monthly Review 74, no. 11 (April 2023): 54–58.
47 Thomas R. Navin and Marian V. Sears, “The Rise of a Market for Industrial Securities, 1887–1902,” Business History Review 29, no. 2 (June 1955): 105–38. 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 (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, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 78, no. 2 (June 2026).
48 Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism, 36.
49 The theory of oligopolistic pricing was first developed by Sweezy in his “kinked-demand curve theory.” Paul M. Sweezy, “Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly,” Journal of Political Economy 47, no. 4 (1939): 568–73. See also Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 15–20.
50 On real unemployment, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), 24–25.
↩ Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1904); Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923).
↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 81–82.
↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 88.
↩ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 30, 151, 158.
↩ Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21, 409; Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 23, 110, 115; Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 39, 736–38; J. M. Blaut, “Evaluating Imperialism,” Science & Society 61, no. 3 (Fall 1997), 382–91; John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 2–8.
↩ Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), vii.
↩ See L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981).
↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 178–86.
↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 268.
↩ James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005).
↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. Baran died in 1964, two years before the book was published. See also John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014 [1986]); Jan Toporowski, “Kalecki and Steindl in the Transition to ‘Monopoly Capital,'” Monthly Review 68, no. 3 (July–August 2016): 39–48; Ramaa Vasudevan, “Digital Platforms: Monopoly Capital Through a Classical-Marxian Lens,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 46 (2022): 1269–88. In an article that is extremely valuable overall in its development of an analysis of what could be called “real monopoly,” building on both Marx’s classical writings and the monopoly capital theory of Baran, Sweezy, and others, Vasudevan states at one point (1276)—drawing on the interpretations of critics of monopoly-capital theory such as Anwar Shaikh and John Weeks—that “the monopoly-capital school” sees certain modern developments, such as the sales effort, as “a suspension or invalidation of Marx’s theory of value and competition.” 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 in significant ways under monopoly capital. See Paul M. Sweezy, “Monopoly Capital and the Theory of Value,” in Foster and Szlajfer, eds., The Faltering Economy, 25–26; John Bellamy Foster, “A Missing Chapter of ‘Monopoly Capital’: Introduction to Baran and Sweezy’s ‘Some Theoretical Implications,'” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 17–21.
↩ Financial expansion as a means of propelling the system was not emphasized in Monopoly Capital but nevertheless was singled out in a separate section in the chapter on the sales effort. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 139–41.
↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 336–67. On the critique of the cultural apparatus under monopoly capitalism, see Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 43–64.
↩ Stephen Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
↩ Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). See also Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London: Verso, 2013); Jan Toporowski, “The Wisdom of Property and the Politics of the Middle Classes,” Monthly Review 62, no. 4 (September 2010): 10–15.
↩ Paul M. Sweezy, “The Triumph of Financial Capital,” Monthly Review 46, no. 2 (June 1994): 1–11; John Bellamy Foster, “Monopoly-Finance Capital,” Monthly Review 58, no. 7 (December 2006): 1–14.
↩ Magdoff and Foster, Grand Theft Capital.
↩ Bernie Sanders, The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers: AI and Automation Could Destroy Nearly 100 Million U.S. Jobs in a Decade, Ranking Member Minority Staff Report, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Washington DC, October 6, 2025.
↩ See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Introduction,” in Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), xxxiii–lxii; Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
↩ Felix Richter, “China Is the World’s Manufacturing Superpower,” Statista, April 16, 2025, statista.com; Roland Rajah and Ahmed Albayrak, “China versus America on Global Trade,” Lowy Institute, January 2025, interactives.lowyinstitute.org.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
↩ Thomas I. Palley, “The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order,” Monthly Review 77, no. 2 (June 2025): 27–47; John Bellamy Foster, “The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry,” Monthly Review 75, no. 9 (February 2024): 1–21.
↩ John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
↩ C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 353–54.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
↩ Michał Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 104; John Bellamy Foster, “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review 77, no. 1 (May 2025): 1–24; John Bellamy Foster, “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism,” Monthly Review 77, no. 2 (June 2025): 1–25.
↩ See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific—An Introduction,” Monthly Review 76, no. 3 (July–August 2024): 6–13; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37–46.
↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014): 1–31.
↩ Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, “Actual U.S. Military Spending Reached $1.53 Trillion in 2022—More Than Twice Acknowledged Level,” Monthly Review 75, no. 6 (November 2023): 18–26; C. Todd Lopez, “$1.5 Trillion Budget Request Prioritizes Service Members, Modernization,” U.S. Department of War, April 21, 2026, war.gov.
↩ Xiao Liang et al., “Trends in World Military Expenditure 2025,” SIPRI, April 2026, sipri.org; Foster, “The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy.”
↩ Owen Brian Toon and Alan Robock, Earth in Flames (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). See also the series on nuclear winter launched by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in May 2026.
↩ Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz, “The Consequences of China’s New Rare Earths Export Restrictions,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 14, 2025, csis.org.
↩ “S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at Munich Security Conference,” February 14, 2026, state.gov. On the nature of economic recolonization in our time, see Prabhat Patnaik, “On the Economic Crisis of Capitalism,” in this issue.
↩ See Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76, no. 10 (March 2025).
↩ Devin B. Martinez, “A Massive AI Data Center Transforms Utah into a National Flashpoint,” People’s Dispatch, May 9, 2026, peoplesdispatch.org.
↩ Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 77, no. 11 (April 2026); Clark and Foster, “The Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States.”
↩ On the concept of exterminism see E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–79. See also Edward Thompson et al., Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982); Rudolf Bahro, Avoiding Social and Economic Disaster (Bath: Gateway Books, 1994), 19–25; John Bellamy Foster, “‘Notes on Exterminism’ for the Twenty-First Century Ecology and Peace Movements,” Monthly Review 74, no. 1 (May 2022): 1–17.
↩ United Nations Environmental Programme, Global Environment Outlook 7: A Future We Choose, December 9, 2025, 503–31.
