As the Pentagon gains approval for yet another record-breaking budget, the editors examine a perennial question: Why does the United States oligarchy need such an outsized military machine in the modern era? The answer is found in the current era of naked imperialism, accompanied, as always with deadly militarism. | more…
This month, MR editors examine elements of the New Cold War rarely discussed in the mainstream media: the U.S. sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, which ensured Europe’s continued reliance on U.S. natural gas, and U.S. plans to transport B61-12 nuclear warheads to locations within striking distance of Russian targets. | more…
“There is no longer any question that the United States is waging a New Cold War,” MR editors write in this month’s “Notes from the Editors.” This war, waged not only against Russia, but increasingly against China, whose approach to global governance is seen as a threat to U.S. imperialism. | more…
March’s “Notes from the Editors” revisits the Non-Aligned Movement and its growing role in the New Cold War. The rise of Russia, China, BRICS, and other nonaligned countries hearlds the emergence of a new, multipolar world, counteracting the global hegemony of the United States. | more…
As C. Wright Mills wrote in 1958, “the immediate causes of World War III are the preparations for it.” This month’s “Notes from the Editors” situates Mills’s words in a contemporary context, with a New Cold War in full swing and imperial powers pushing us ever closer to a Third World War. | more…
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” marks the 30-year anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The abject failure of this framework to enact meaningful progress on the planetary crisis continued to be on full display in 2022, including at November’s COP27 in Egypt. | more…
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” takes on the Biden Administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, a bellicose document that rattles sabers towards the supposed autocracies of Russia and China while reviving the age-old lie of the United States as protector of democracy. | more…
The latest Review of the Month, written by Spanish geologist Carles Soriano, considers the implications of idea of the Capitalocene, the historical determinations affecting the study of the Earth Sciences, and how our views of the current planetary crisis are often shaped by inadequate narratives. Current approaches, he writes are “non-dialectic and non-materialist regarding the study of social reproduction modes, and this renders the whole understanding of the planetary crisis not only incomplete but idealist, for the capitalist mode is assumed as absolute rather than historical.” | more…
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of The Limits of Growth, one of the most influential, and also controversial, environmental studies ever written. No other environmental work of the 1970s offered such a direct challenge to the underlying assumptions of capitalist neoclassical growth economics, or was responded to so vehemently by establishment thinkers. | more…
Our current geological time period, characterized by drastic planetary shifts due to anthropogenic climate change, is popularly known as the Anthropocene Epoch. Recent proposals for naming the first age of this epoch highlight capitalism’s central role in the ongoing climate crisis. | more…
Between 1949 and 1980, over a hundred articles in Monthly Review dealt with the Soviet Union directly, with many more addressing it indirectly. But, after 1993, treatments of post-Soviet Russia in the magazine largely ceased. | more…
Time is running out for the world to carry out the social transformations necessary to avert irreversible climate catastrophe, keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5°C (or below 2°C). The most optimistic scenario currently provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes a pathway in which the increase in temperature will not rise to 1.5°C until 2040, peaking at 1.6°C, and then falling back to 1.4°C by the end of this century. But to achieve this will require revolutionary scale transformational change in global social relations affecting the human relation to the climate and the planetary environment as a whole. | more…
To get a firm grasp on the current situation in Ukraine, we must understand the central role that the United States and NATO have played in the conflict from the start, beginning in 2014 with the U.S.-engineered Maidan coup. | more…