Top Menu

Monthly Review Volume 71, Number 2 (June 2019)

June 2019 (Volume 71, Number 2)

The situation in Venezuela has become extremely dire due to Washington’s heightened economic warfare, its continuing attempts to engineer a political coup, and its growing threats of massive military intervention—all aimed at bringing down the Bolivarian Republic. The recent seizure of Venezuelan oil assets in the United States and its gold reserves in British banks, as well as the sanctioning of Venezuelan oil sales, have come on top of a long series of economic sanctions—beginning with the Obama administration and now intensified under Trump’s—that constitute nothing less than a modern form of siege warfare, extended to food supplies and medicine. But the Venezuelan Revolution has managed to resist in the face of the economic and political warfare of the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, and the reasons why are to be found in the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution and the Venezuelan people themselves. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 11 (April 2019)

April 2019 (Volume 70, Number 11)

Notes from the Editors

In the midst of the U.S.-directed coup attempt against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in January–February, Donald Trump delivered a number of verbal attacks on socialism in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The immediate object was to justify U.S. attempts to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic. The less immediate, but hardly less important, goal was to tarnish the growing social democratic (self-styled democratic socialist) movement in the United States, associated with figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In order to safeguard their ambitious social-reform program, the new coterie of Democratic Party socialists have thus sought to separate themselves from Venezuela and other Latin American socialist states, presumably abandoning these countries to their fates at the hands of U.S. imperialism. This raises the historic question of social imperialism—a policy of social reform at home and imperial hegemony abroad. | more…

Wall Street, New York, United States. Photo by Woldai Wagner.

The Critique of Financialization

A Reply to Michael Roberts

There has been a tendency within liberal analysis of financialization to place an emphasis on the trees, that is, the various speculative mechanisms, rather than the forest, or the growth of finance in relation to production. The reason for this stress on the trees rather than the forest is that, in contemporary capitalist ideology, financialization cannot be brought seriously into question since it is part of the entire architecture of accumulation. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 10 (March 2019)

March 2019 (Volume 70, Number 10)

Notes from the Editors

The present ongoing coup attempt organized in Washington is simply the latest in a series of such attempts by the U.S. government to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela over the last two decades. It can be seen as having three interrelated motives: (1) the destruction of Venezuelan socialism, (2) regaining control of Venezuela’s oil (the largest petroleum reserves in the world), and (3) reasserting U.S. hegemony over Latin America. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 9 (February 2019)

February 2019 (Volume 70, Number 9)

Notes from the Editors

Climatologist James Hansen’s 2018 “Climate Change in a Nutshell: The Gathering Storm,” known as the Nutshell document, is the single most important analysis currently available for general readers seeking to stay abreast of the science and politics of global warming. Nevertheless, denial of the extent of the conflict between capitalism and the climate remains pervasive. Such views were subjected to a strong refutation by Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm in a November 2018 paper entitled “Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions: The Road to ‘Hothouse Earth’ Is Paved With Good Intentions.” | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 8 (January 2019)

January 2019 (Volume 70, Number 8)

Notes from the Editors

In this issue we commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the publishing of the definitive version of The Combahee River Collective Statement in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. We are also extremely pleased to announce Monthly Review Press author Kohei Saito has won the prestigious Deutscher prize for 2018 for his Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. There is no doubt that this book constitutes one of the great works of Marxian theory in our time. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 7 (December 2018)

December 2018 (Volume 70, Number 7)

With the dramatic rise of eco-Marxism in recent years, a corresponding revolution has been taking place in studies of the human-nonhuman animal relationship. Previous critical analyses with respect to the position of animals in human society have been largely dictated by animal-rights discourse, more recently represented by figures such as Peter Singer. Many of these analyses contend that Karl Marx, Marxism, and historical materialism understand the human-nonhuman animal relationship through a dualist, “speciesist,” or human-centric, framework—a critique most famously championed by pioneering ecosocialist Ted Benton. This issue is dedicated to analyzing the theoretical propositions underlying Marx’s analysis and to demonstrate the antispeciesist and antidualist aspects of his evolutionary-materialist understanding. | more…

November 2018 (Volume 70, Number 6)

November 2018 (Volume 70, Number 6)

The twenty-first century has resulted in a vast upsurge of ecological Marxism and ecosocialism more generally, building on the environmental critique of capitalism embedded in classical historical materialism. At the same time, it has also engendered opposing tendencies and approaches concerning how we understand relentless ecological destruction under capitalism. This issue is dedicated to exploring the theoretical advances, schools of thought, and debates on the left in regard to our world’s ecological crisis, which threatens the survival of humanity and is inescapable within the present capitalist system of production. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 4 (September 2018)

September 2018 (Volume 70, Number 4)

Notes from the Editors

Founded in the late 1960s and recently revived, the radical organization Science for the People did—and does—far more than just publish a magazine. Chapters are forming around the country, including physicists, engineers, and biologists, as well as representatives of other scientific groupings and social movements. We at MR welcome the return of this great publication and movement of the U.S. left. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 3 (July-August 2018)

July-August 2018 (Volume 70, Number 3)

Notes from the Editors

This special issue is dedicated to developing the ecological critique embodied in Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift.” Each article uses the metabolic rift perspective to uncover core contradictions of capitalism, as well as possible paths toward a new system—one that will meet human needs while protecting the earth and future generations. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 70, Number 2 (June 2018)

June 2018 (Volume 70, Number 2)

With the eruption in March of the scandal around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, articles raising the alarm on “surveillance capitalism” are suddenly everywhere. The term, which was coined in MR in August of 2014, was developed to highlight the links between digital spying systems and contemporary capitalism as a whole. Academic interpretations of the concept effectively divorced surveillance capitalism from class analysis, and from the overall political-economic structure of capitalism—as if surveillance could be abstracted from monopoly-finance capital as a whole. | more…