Articles

Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance

Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance

by Torkil Lauesen

March 1, 2025

Torkil Lauesen delves into the legacy of celebrated Arghiri Emmanuel, whose theory of unequal exchange resonates well into the twenty-first century. Introduced in 1962, Emmanuel's critique of Ricardian and neoliberal capitalism further illuminated the Marxist concept value as it relates to global exchange and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North.
Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

by The Editors

March 1, 2025

Using data from Brazil's Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexity of unstable labor dynamics in a world of informal and precarious work.
Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

by John Bellamy Foster

February 1, 2025

Over the last quarter century—and especially since the beginning of Israel's latest genocidal incursion into Palestine in October 2023—the term "settler colonialism" has proliferated in academic and popular discourse. In February's "Review of the Month," John Bellamy Foster connects readers to thinkers from around the globe and across time to illustrate the phenomenon of settler colonialism as a dimension of imperialism, and thus capitalism, driven by a rapacious extractivism that threatens the whole of humanity.
Chinese-Style Modernization: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance

Chinese-Style Modernization: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance

by The Editors

February 1, 2025

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."
Emerging Oceanic Struggles for No-Nukes in Japan

Emerging Oceanic Struggles for No-Nukes in Japan

by Lau Kin Chiand Sit Tsui

February 1, 2025

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.
January 2025 (Volume 76, Number 8)

January 2025 (Volume 76, Number 8)

by The Editors

January 1, 2025

Monthly Review editors take on the results of the 2024 election, exploring how the lackluster reformist policies of the Biden administration and unfocused nature of the Harris campaign served to drive away much of the working class, as reflected in part by the expansion of the Party of Nonvoters. As neoliberal positions occlude the possibility of a Popular Front against Trump's fascism, any substantive victory must come from a revolutionary restructuring of society.

The Dialectical Ecologist: Richard Levins and the Science and Praxis of the Human-Nature Metabolism

The Dialectical Ecologist: Richard Levins and the Science and Praxis of the Human-Nature Metabolism

by Brett Clarkand John Bellamy Foster

January 1, 2025

In January's Review of the Month, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark revisit the legacy of scientist and MR author Richard Levins, from his "red diaper" infancy to his agroecological work in Cuba and his contributions to Marxian ecological thinking as a whole. "As a dialectical ecologist," they write, "Levins proposed that we ask the big questions, as part of understanding why the world came to be organized in a particular way, and how it might be different."

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