For our seventy-fifth anniversary issue, John Bellamy Foster revisits the legacy of Albert Einstein and his deep connections to Monthly Review, including his authorship of the article “Why Socialism?,” published in our first-ever issue in May 1949. Through historical documents and the famed physicist’s own words, Foster rediscovers Einstein’s commitment to socialism in both word and deed, and his collegial ties to MR‘s founding editors. | more…
This article will be released in full online May 6, 2023.
Over six months into to Israel’s atrocity-filled assault on Gaza, Laurence Shoup digs deep to reveal a rarely discussed—but enormously influential—force within the Israel Lobby: the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR, he writes, is more than just Wall Street’s think tank; it is an elite network of Zionist politicians and donors who comprise a significant part of the Israel lobby and the continuing U.S. commitment to funding Israel’s genocidal actions in Palestine. | more…
This month’s Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the idea of extractivism, a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth’s resources since the mid-twentieth century, Foster notes, threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet. | more…
As populations worldwide grow older, politicians are clamoring to raise the retirement age, thus extending people’s working lives at their own expense. Using the lens of political economy, Cai Chao examines the false narratives behind capitalists’ claims that delayed retirement is necessary to maintain society’s productive capacity, and proposes solutions to promote human development at all life stages. | more…
Paul Burkett’s death on January 7, 2024, at age 67, means that the world is suddenly bereft of the figure who played the leading role over the last three decades in developing a Marxist ecological economics in the face of the growing planetary crisis. His loss leaves ecological Marxism without its foremost exponent of the ecological critique of capitalist value relations. It also means the loss of a warm and compassionate human being, and a beloved jazz musician. | more…
Christian Noakes tells the story of the struggle to liberate jazz from the exploitative, white-controlled music industry in 1950s and beyond. Recounting the seminal events of the movement and backlash from white civil society, Noakes reveals a legacy of Black cultural autonomy and resistance led by such jazz legends as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, Bill Dixon, and others. | more…
This lyrical vignette from the recently departed Paul Burkett is the author’s final, posthumously published piece for Monthly Review. In it, the eminent ecological economist and jazz musician muses on the nature of creativity, technology, and the corporatization of music—and the struggle to decommodify it, freeing musicians and their craft from the confines of capitalism. | more…
Drawing on writings, historical accounts, and personal letters, Kaan Kangal surveys the considerable extent of Marx and Engels’s interest in language and capabilities as polyglots. This interest, he argues, was part and parcel of their political commitment to building worldwide socialism. | more…
Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, examines a recent biography of Irving R. Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death. Using his own deep research into his parents’ case, Meeropol shows how Kaufman’s virulent anti-Communism led him to put his thumb on the scales of justice, despite the later progressive liberalism for which he is often lauded. This in turn reveals a key contradiction: “Liberal democracy is fine as long as the basis of the system is not threatened. When it is…’dangerous’ people—Communists and other leftists—are dealt with by any means necessary.” | more…
In this review of Linda Dittmar’s Tracing Homelands, Paul Buhle writes, “History may yet hold hope when hope is otherwise lacking when we reject the stalemate that only leads to despair.” | more…
