McMurtry's recent research has focused on the underlying value structure of economic theory, its
consequences for global civil and environmental life, and the life ground and civil commons. McMurtry considers the global free market "inefficient and life-destructive" in proportion to how unregulated it is by life needs (that without which life capacity is reduced) and by life capital (human and ecological life wealth that reproduces more life wealth if not run down). In general, four principles of analysis and development are applied: the life-ground (all the conditions required to take one's next breath), life value (whatever enables life capacities), life capital (means of life that can produce more means of life without loss and cumulative gain), and civil commons (any social construct that enables universal access of community members to life goods through time). In
Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market As An Ethical System, 1998, he examines the underlying value system of the global market and claims that it constructs the opposite of the "free and democratic society" it claims to bring about. In
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 1999, he claims a propensity of human societies to assume the social order in which they live as good however life-destructive they may be, focusing on
financial capitalism as displaying the hallmark characteristics of a cancer invasion at the social level of life organization. He conceives "the civil commons" as a social immune system. In
Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, 2002, he criticizes capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, NATO wars, and an expanding prison regime as symptoms of a "new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns", and proposes constitutional standards of a "life economy". McMurtry addressed the
9/11 conspiracy theories to explain the
September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In one lecture, he drew comparisons to the event of the
Reichstag fire and argued that the
War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) was lobbied for and exploited by multinational corporations. Journalist
Jonathan Kay includes him among the most influential Canadian members of the largely American
9/11 truth movement. == Publications ==