In May’s Review of the Month, MR editors dissect the true meaning behind the right-wing obsession with “Cultural Marxism” and its use to justify the right-wing takeover of the administrative state and the spread of the New McCarthyism threatening all those who oppose the administration. However, the editors point out, what the right fears is not a culturally based, postmodern approach to Marxism, but Marxism as it is historically and materially grounded and its true potential for building a proletarian movement against fascism. | more…
John Bellamy Foster presents a rogue’s gallery of the fascist ideologues insidiously pushing the MAGA agenda, from the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 to neo-Nazi YouTubers and cultural influencers. “The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement,” Foster writes, “were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically.” | more…
This article will be released in full online May 5, 2025.
As we mourn the loss of prolific MR author and media advocate Robert W. McChesney, we are grateful to be able to publish an excerpt from his introduction to John Bellamy Foster’s Trump in the White House (Monthly Review Press, 2017). In this insightful analysis, McChesney explains how neoliberal restructuring prepared paved the way for Trump and the neofascist MAGA movement to reach the dizzying heights of power that they have reached today. | more…
This article will be released in full online May 12, 2025.
Pranay Somayajula dives deep into how the idea of decolonization has taken hold both theoretically and practically, showing how its deployment by the fascist Hindutva movement to justify anti-Muslim oppression reveals a latent threat: potential cooptation by actors seeking to promote nationalist identities in postcolonial contexts. Somayajula concludes that what is needed is a “return to a materially grounded understanding of empire and resistance,” adding that “Any version of decolonization…placing a greater importance than the abstract than the material is a ‘decolonization’ that has lost its way.” | more…
This article will be released in full online May 19, 2025.
In this contribution to the further development of socialism with Chinese characteristics Cheng Enfu and Yang Jun offer their “Theory of Triple Revolution,” enumerating the historical stages of the Chinese Revolution and analyzing its current trajectory. A complete revolutionary view of Marxism in China, they conclude, “will advance the spirit of the revolution to its completion….[moving] forward along the correct track of Marxism, such that a powerful revolutionary vision will open up before us.” | more…
This month, MR editors take on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a pale imitation of the five authentic Nobel Prizes that is aimed at reinforcing the ideology of neoclassical economics and awarded to mainstream liberal economists who defend the institutions of capitalism. In line with this tradition, the editors note, the most recent winners are keen apologists for settler colonialism and Zionism. | more…
John Bellamy Foster revisits and critiques the contention that the U.S. capitalist class is not a “governing” class, or indeed a class-conscious bloc in any sense. However, he writes, the fact that the ruling-class oligarchy is now openly wielding power on the national and international stages as part of the Trump regime shows that the overwhelming political influence of the capitalist class is no longer in dispute as this alignment pushes the country deeper into neofascism. | more…
What is ecological civilization? In this article, Chen Yiwen presents a dialectical analysis that illuminates the theoretical and practical elements of ecological civilization, particularly as it develops in the context of China. In China, he notes, significant progress has been made, but there remain outstanding questions that must be resolved during the transition to an ecologically harmonious society that promotes global equality and human flourishing. | more…
Yumeng Liu takes a deep dive into the history of Laos, the only socialist nation among the Theravāda Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, examining how the country has developed its own particular approach to socialism, influenced by both local Buddhist beliefs and Marxist ideology. Liu also explores the historical and present-day tensions inherent in this uniquely Lao approach to socialist development. | more…
“The Big Business-military coalition in the United States,” Paul A. Baran wrote in this prescient reprise from 1952, “assumes all of the functions of a fascist regime…. And it develops rapidly into its own American variety of government under capitalism in an age of imperialism, wars, and national and social revolutions. It becomes fully adapted to its sinister historical mission—to be the instrument of ruthless class struggle on the national and international planes.” | more…
The editors analyze recent shift in mainstream discourse away from the goal of energy transition toward capitalist friendly policies that allow corporations to receive large subsidies for inadequate “solutions.” Despite the scientific consensus that these are insufficient to tackle the planetary crisis, capital and its advocates continue to promote the abandonment of the energy transition in the effort to maintain U.S. imperial dominance and feed its hunger for fossil fuels. | more…
John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill assess the history and influence of Western Marxism, defined not geographically, but by a rejection of the Marxism developed in the Soviet Union, in the Global South, and even in classical Marxism. This strain of Marxist thought, birthed in the imperial core, represents a concession to the dominance of U.S. ideology, rather than to correct the pressing issues confronting society today. | more…
In this excerpt from Ellen Meiksins Wood’s In Defense of History, Wood appraises the state of postmodern thought in the late twentieth century. “Today’s postmodernism,” Wood writes, “for all of its apparently defeatist pessimism, is still rooted in the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism.’ It’s time to leave that legacy behind and face today’s realities.” | more…
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