May 2026
Dear Friend of Monthly Review,
In the early 1970s, the Vietnam War was still raging; Washington covertly directed a bloody coup in Chile; and a severe economic crisis emerged in the United States. It was in this difficult time that Bob McChesney and I, as undergraduates at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, discovered Monthly Review, representing an island of rationality in an irrational capitalist world. MR provided a coherent perspective on the present as history. MR was an Independent Socialist Magazine, edited by two of the leading figures of the U.S. left, both distinguished economists, Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy. Bob and I and our friends went to Seattle to hear Sweezy give a lecture, and to Eugene, Oregon, for the Union of Radical Political Economics meetings, where MR’s influence was palpable. We avidly studied the works emanating from the MR tradition.
Graduating from college, I went to Toronto to do graduate studies in political economy at York University, and Bob went to Seattle, where he started a rock and roll magazine, The Rocket, and later entered the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. We eventually became professors—Bob at the University of Wisconsin and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, me at the University of Oregon. In 1980, I became friends with Harry and Paul and began writing for MR the following year. This was the early Reagan era and MR’s analysis of economic stagnation, financialization, and imperialism revealed the reality disguised by the dominant ideology. MR was home to socialists and radicals around the world, many of whom became friends: figures like Ralph Miliband, Daniel Singer, István Mészáros, Samir Amin ,Immanuel Wallerstein, Cornel West, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Michael Yates (who later became director of Monthly Review Press). The 1980s overall were a period of regression, and MR was hit by a number of political and financial shocks. In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall—a moment of a severe crisis for the left—I joined the editorial committee of the magazine and the board of the Monthly Review Foundation.
Harry and Paul were then in their late eighties and were no longer able to run the magazine on their own. These problems were eased for a few years when Martin Paddio became general manager of MR, and when Ellen Meiksins Wood joined Harry and Paul as a coeditor of the magazine. Nevertheless, the turbulence affecting the magazine continued. In 2000, with Ellen’s departure, Bob and I stepped in as coeditors with Harry and Paul, and the magazine was to achieve a new era of stability. Along with Bob and me, Fred Magdoff was to play an important part in the resurrection of MR’s foundational critique in political economy. Bob was to stay on as coeditor until 2004, when he stepped down (while remaining a director of the board) in order to start the left media advocacy group Free Press. Paul died in 2004, followed by Harry in 2006, leaving me as sole editor of the magazine.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, others came to the magazine, including Brett Clark, Hannah Holleman, Intan Suwandi, and R. Jamil Jonna—all of whom remain crucial to the running of MR today. Brett is associate editor, Hannah and Intan are on the editorial committee, and Jamil is associate editor for communications and production. Together with Sarah Kramer, the assistant editor, and John Mage, this constitutes the core of the magazine. In the last quarter-century, MR’s chief concerns have broadened to encompass the environment alongside its longstanding attention to political economy and imperialism. Although the advent of the Internet led to the demise of numerous small publications, MR has survived. Rather than shorten our articles so as to compete with the Internet, we decided, at Bob’s suggestion, to deepen our research and even at times increase the length of our articles somewhat, while remaining as accessible as possible, with the goal of providing the analysis that those on the left desperately needed. At the same time, we set up MR Online, with Colin Vanderburg now as feature editor, to provide daily information on world events and socialist views. Monthly Review Press has continued to issue powerful and indispensable works. Michael retired as director of MR Press at the end of last year, and Arun Kundnani has joined us as the new Press director, carrying on from where Michael left off.
Bob died a year ago on March 25. One of the last things that he said to me, with the rise of neofascism in the United States, was that this was MR’s moment. MR’s whole history, going back to the McCarthy Era, had prepared us to be a beacon for the left in times of distress. With racial, class, and gender oppression in the United States at a new peak, ICE stormtroopers sowing terror throughout society, and the United States engaged in a major imperialist war in West Asia, while threatening the entire world, the critical and historical analysis for which MR is famous worldwide is needed more than ever. A whole new generation of radicals is emerging seeking critical insights and we are eager to bring them into the MR family.
As a reader of the magazine and MR Press books, you have been part of this story. Calling this moment of neofascism and naked imperialism by its name is crucial. Together we will resist and overcome, but we need your help. You are our support. We are counting on you.
In Solidarity,
John Bellamy Foster