Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China’s successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, “represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony.” | more…
In this deeply stirring account, Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi share their field research, conducted over years of travel and relationship-building, into the Japanese antinuclear movement. As the people and environment of Fukushima continue to be impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, the No-Nukes movement has grown in response, encompassing aspects of society ranging from artists and monks to fisherfolk and intellectuals. | more…
December’s Monthly Review begins the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Harry Braverman’s seminal work, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974), with this Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster, which explores the connections between Marx’s “collective worker,” Braverman’s “collective scientist,” and the struggle against the degradation of work in the digital age. | more…
What was the impact of Labor and Monopoly Capital in its day, and what is its resonance in ours? Kuang Xiaolu, Li Zhi, and Xie Fusheng take stock of Harry Braverman’s influential scholarship over the last half-century. In sum, they write, “with the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the significance of Labor and Monopoly Capital has long surpassed narrow national boundaries and the era in which Braverman lived.” | more…
Following Harry Braverman’s assertion that we must examine “by way of concrete historical specific analysis of technology…on one side and social relations on the other” in order to understand the impact of the Scientific-Technical Revolution on our daily lives, John Hedlund and Stefano B. Longo describe the explosion of the Synthetic Age of plastics, revealing the commodification of science in service of capital. | more…
Mark Allison reviews Brian Merchant’s timely Blood in the Machine (Little, Brown, and Co., 2023), finding in it a compelling historical account of the original Luddite movement with important parallels to our own age of Big Tech. However, Allison asks, are the lessons drawn from Blood in the Machine even possible within the confines of capitalism? | more…
John Bellamy Foster returns to the touchstones of anti-imperialist Marxist thought, found in the works of V. I. Lenin, Samir Amin, and others, in order to confront the rising denial of imperialism on the left. This worldview and its consequences, he writes, has troubling implications not only for the superexploited workers of the periphery, but for all of the workers of the world, and for the internationalist character of contemporary Marxism. | more…
In this deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence, Pietro Daniel Omodeo employs the frameworks laid out in Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master to weave a sociological history of AI that begins with the class struggles of the Industrial Revolution and continues into the context of early twentieth-century computing, which eventually gave rise our current Information Age. “AI,” he concludes, “sheds light onto the intellectual component of labor in all ages.” | more…
Since the 1980s, Chinese writers and thinkers have been engaging with Marxist ecology, constructing a theoretical system that starts with interpretation of Marx and Engels themselves. Chen Yiwen takes stock of how this framework progressed toward an overarching theory of ecological civilization, generating new questions to be answered at every stage of development. | more…
Iqra Angurah elucidates the strategic role in the Indo-Pacific in the context of the New Cold War and, in particular, the country’s close ties to the forces of multinational capital and Western imperialism. The alignment of the Global North and local elites underscores the need for a popular, socialist, and anti-imperialist movement among the Indonesian working class. | more…
As the world hurtles toward planetary catastrophe, driven in large part by the unchecked burning of fossil fuels in the Global North, China has emerged as a leader in renewable energy. This dynamic, Julie de los Reyes and Jewellord Nem Singh contend, mirrors China’s ascendance in many sectors, revealing “the glaring failure of the liberal international order to address pressing social and environmental issues.” | more…
There is a growing sense in China, Alex Witherspoon, Amir Khan, and Yu Zhou write, that the timeworn methods of social advancement are yielding diminishing returns. Using an original survey of 301 individuals in Jingzhou City, the authors lay bare the roots of this widespread feeling of involution. | more…
