Foreword by John Bellamy Foster to István Mészáros book : “Structural Crisis of Capital” published by Monthly Review Press, 2009 If I were asked to sum up the significance of István Mészáros for our time in a phrase I would have to follow President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in referring to him as the [...]

  A new kind of society will only make sense and be truly emancipated if its vital functions are effectively exercised autonomously by the freely associated producers and not by an external, extraneous body in control of those functions by Richard Antunes “The obvious question we must now address concerns the nature of the globally [...]

  “Given the massive inertia generated by capital’s vested interests in the privileged capitalist countries and reformist labor’s consensual complicity in their self-serving development, a triggering social upheaval is much more likely to take place in Latin America than in the United States or Western Europe, with far-reaching implications for the rest of the world.” [...]

  Capital, we must understand, is the obstacle to human development. We can go beyond specific barriers it presents, but capital will always present new barriers, and only struggle itself will determine whether capital itself proves to be the Limit or only the Barrier. In place of that system which destroys the “original sources of [...]

       The Importance of  “Socialist Accountancy”[1]             To build the new socialist society, it is necessary to develop new, socialist concepts. We cannot proceed as if the categories and concepts of capitalism are applicable to the relations of associated producers (any more than the specifically capitalist mode of production or the capitalist state). [...]

Ideas become a material force when they grasp the minds of masses. This is true not only of ideas which can support revolutionary change. It is also true of those ideas which prevent change. An obvious example is the concept of TINA — the idea that there is no alternative, no alternative to neoliberalism, no [...]

  . When stressing the need for a radical structural change it must be made clear right from the beginning that this is not a call for an unrealizable utopia. On the contrary, the primary defining characteristic of modern utopian theories was precisely the projection that their intended improvement in the conditions of the workers’ [...]

  IN BUILDING THE NEW SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE To build the new socialist society, it is necessary to develop new, socialist concepts. We cannot proceed as if the categories and concepts of capitalism are applicable to the relations of associated producers (any more than the specifically capitalist mode of production or the capitalist state). Indeed, the [...]

  Much closer to the start of a great global revolt against the plutocracy Notes from  the Editors Monthly Review , January 1912 In a little more than two months at this writing (December 3, 2011) the Occupy Wall Street movement has ushered in a new dialectic of world revolt. Occupy movements now exist in [...]

  Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance [...]