A Message from John Bellamy Foster

Dear Friends,

Monthly Review emerged seventy-five years ago out of the Popular Front milieu of the Great Depression and Second World War years, which has been a key part of our identity ever since. The historical significance of this is perhaps best captured by Gerald Horne, author of a number of landmark Monthly Review Press books, including Jazz and Justice (2019), who wrote:

The Popular Front [was] an international movement that exercised a powerful influence on U.S. culture in the 1930s and ’40s. Initiated during the Great Depression and often led by the U.S. Communist Party, the Popular front grouped under one umbrella the radical and liberal forces animated by antifascism. Grounded in expansive labor-organizing campaigns, it fought against Jim Crow in the South, ran solidarity campaigns for international causes like Republican Spain, and lent grassroots support to the programs of the New Deal. At the peak of its strength, the Popular Front gave rise to a trend that did not outlast the end of World War II: Communists, liberals, and even some centrists acting in concert, especially on an anti-fascist, pro-labor, antiracist basis (Criterion, April 21, 2022).

The demise of the Popular Front as a major movement in the United States can be traced to the political defeat of former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who ran as the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 presidential elections. The Wallace campaign, representing the left of the New Deal, was undermined by a combination of red-baiting and belated promises to labor issued by Harry S. Truman as the Democratic Party nominee.
Following Wallace’s defeat, and in the midst of the growing McCarthyism of the times, Huberman and Sweezy (who together had written the preamble to the Progressive Party platform) founded Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine in May 1949, with the strong support of such leading left figures as F. O. Matthiessen and Albert Einstein. One of the first things that the MR editors did in the new magazine was to launch a discussion of “Cooperation on the Left.” It soon became apparent, however, that McCarthyism had already so pulverized the left that cooperation of the kind they envisioned was then impossible. Huberman and Sweezy were both targeted by the McCarthyite Inquisition, with the Sweezy case (Sweezy vs. New Hampshire) going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Monthly Review therefore came to be understood internally in its early years as a holding action, keeping an independent socialist position in the United States alive against all the odds. In the following decades MR was to distinguish itself mainly through to its political-economic critique of monopoly capital, militarism, and imperialism.

In Sweezy’s view, presented in his The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), the dominance of liberalism within the political sphere, once challenged by a working class-based socialist movement from below, depended at all times on the development of a tenuous “class equilibrium.” Such a class equilibrium had disappeared almost everywhere with the crisis of liberalism in the 1930s at the time of the Great Depression. However, it was revived in a more expansive form in the United States during the relative economic prosperity of the decades immediately following the Second World War, reinforced by a Cold War “consensus” and military Keynesianism. Nevertheless, with onset of economic stagnation, financialization, rapidly increasing inequality, declining U.S. economic hegemony, and the globalization of production, beginning in the 1970s, this class equilibrium began to disintegrate both in the United States and in most of the rest of the capitalist world.

Faced with a rapid disintegration of the class equilibrium due to the developing structural crisis of capital, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital—including fossil capital, the new tech-finance elite, and the military-industrial complex—turned to neoliberalism, and then when that began to fail, increasingly to neofascism. The latter relies on the dangerous mobilization by forces at the apex of the system, of the lower-middle class, based on a revanchist ideology that is nationalistic, racist, sexist, warmongering, and anti-environmental.

The still nascent response of the left in these dire circumstances, as evidenced by recent developments in France—but also appearing elsewhere in the capitalist world—has been to call for a renewed Popular Front as the main weapon against fascism, racism, exterminism, and monopoly-finance capital. Here too a much broader alliance against imperialism is necessary. In this context, the rise of a growing alliance across the Global South in the form of the BRICS can be seen as a kind of South-based global Popular Front in the face of the increased belligerence of the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan in their attempt to shore up the imperial “rules-based order.” In all of this, Monthly Review stands committed to furthering genuine cooperation on the global left consistent with the pursuit of revolutionary socialist, humanist, and ecological ends, and the goal of world peace.

But as you know, in order to do this we will need your help. Since our founding nearly seventy-five years ago, MR Associates have been the beating heart of everything we do. Basic magazine subscriptions cover little more than the costs of printing and mailing, and electronic subscriptions, while growing, make only a modest impact on our bottom line. We have no foundation support, no endowment. Please become an Associate or, if you have joined already, consider renewing at the same or a higher level.

Please help us now in whatever way you can.

In Solidarity,

John Bellamy Foster