December 1, 2017
Longtime readers of Monthly Review would likely agree that the world is a colder, darker place without Doug Dowd, economist, activist, writer, teacher, and friend. He was a rock-bottom radical, a measure of the very best in the human soul.
December 1, 2017
The political ineffectuality of Marxism in the United States is the consequence most importantly of the nature and history of U.S. capitalism. But also important in explaining this feebleness is what Marxists have and have not done, who they are, and their "style."
December 1, 2017
Amid deep disparities between states, the act of moving across borders becomes a way of re-politicizing the very idea of states, borders, and nations—concepts that have for centuries been taken for granted and excluded from debate.
November 1, 2017
Over the last three decades, Monthly Review has stood out as a major source of ecosocialist analysis. This has been especially evident in recent months, with the publication by Monthly Review Press of three pathbreaking books: Kohei Saito, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy; Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism; and Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation.
November 1, 2017
From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large—over decades and centuries. However, given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation.
November 1, 2017
We have entered a period of history fraught with danger but also rich with revolutionary potential. It is time to move beyond our illusions that electoral politics and reforms of the capitalist state can achieve the revolutionary changes that we all know are urgently needed. As we begin to reorient our struggles there are important lessons to be learned from the recent history of the global South.
November 1, 2017
Despite its grip on the scientific culture of affluent societies, the reign of the gene as the supposed "secret of life" is coming to an end. The more we learn about natural systems the clearer it becomes that genes are only one class of factors influencing phenotypic development and evolution.
November 1, 2017
is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit.
November 1, 2017
President Chávez, in line with Marx, identified revolutionary praxis as the key link between human development and practice: "We have to practice socialism…and this practice will create us, ourselves, it will change us; if not we won't make it." From this standpoint, the material product of activity is always accompanied by a second product—the human product. Since the human product has historically been neglected in socialist theories of transition, it is worth considering its significance.
November 1, 2017
Historians have long documented the ways that capitalism drew its early accumulation from the dispossession of commonly owned resources—a process that continues to this day. Building a socialist society and economy can be thought of as a reversal of this process—a reclaiming of commons. The resources that contribute to human development do so best when shared and governed democratically. This includes not only the forests and fields of the pre-capitalist past, but also education and health care systems, parks and streets, waterways, and the shared culture, knowledge, and productive resources of a society.
