In a December 2023 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Richard Haass, former special assistant to H. W. Bush, declared that the world has descended into a “new world disorder,” lamenting the long-lost dream of unending U.S. hegemony. This month’s “Notes from the Editors” reflects on not only Haass’s recent statements, but his longstanding advocacy of an “Imperial America” designed to ensure U.S. domination on the world stage. | more…
Matthew Sharpe discusses Aymeric Monville’s Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche (The Misery of Left Nietzscheanism), an exploration of how Nietzsche’s popularity on the left co-opts truly radical energy in favor of authoritarianism and elitism. “If Monville is right,” Sharpe concludes, “Nietzcheanism has acted as a kind of ideological ‘useful idiot.’” | more…
Over the past decades, the left in Poland has found its political ambitions frustrated by an inability to connect with the general electorate, pushing the movement collectively toward dissolution. In this timely article, Damian Winczewski explores the shifting constellations attempting to revive Polish left. | more…
What lessons can be drawn from the struggle against fascism in the previous century? One answer, Jacques LaPere writes, can be found the new English translation of Portuguese antifascist Manuel Tiago’s Until Tomorrow, Comrades. | more…
Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union
Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.
In Until We
Following the work of scientist and Sinologist Joseph Needham, this talk by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the conceptual linkages between the ancient Greek and Chinese thought and modern dialectical materialism and ecological civilization. This interweaving of intellectual traditions, he writes, has created a “powerful organic ecological-materialist philosophy.” | more…
A unique historical account of poor peoples’ self-defence strategies in the face of the plunder of their lands and labor
For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital.
As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons, mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Engels foresaw that without disarmament, Europe would soon be plunged into war. Modern weaponry has made the question of disarmament even more urgent. In this month’s “Notes from the Editors,” the editors put forward the objectives for a contemporary socialist disarmament strategy. | more…
In popular thought, the youth and student movements of France May 1968 have been linked with the thinkers of what is known as French theory. Gabriel Rockhill considers the actual, less-than-revolutionary actions of these popular philosophers in the student revolts, then turns our attention to a deeper question: Who benefits from drawing these tenuous connections? | more…
This month, MR editors examine elements of the New Cold War rarely discussed in the mainstream media: the U.S. sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, which ensured Europe’s continued reliance on U.S. natural gas, and U.S. plans to transport B61-12 nuclear warheads to locations within striking distance of Russian targets. | more…
“There is no longer any question that the United States is waging a New Cold War,” MR editors write in this month’s “Notes from the Editors.” This war, waged not only against Russia, but increasingly against China, whose approach to global governance is seen as a threat to U.S. imperialism. | more…
Andy Higginbottom analyzes the influence of Ruy Mauro Marini on dependency theory and the concept of superexploitation. Marini, he explains, carried Marx’s legacy forward—but there is still work to be done in the twenty-first century. | more…