Top Menu

Americas

Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey by Dan Berger

A History of Black Power We Need and Deserve

This article will be released in full online November 18, 2023.

Say Burgin reviews Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey, an account of the fight for Black Power as told through the Simmons family, and particularly, Michael and Zoharah Simmons, from their first meeting during SNCC’s Atlanta Project to their later painful struggles as a family. The story that shines through, Burgin writes, is a story of Black Power that is deeply personal, often messy, and, above all, a refreshing challenge to popular narratives that serve to demonize the history of Black Power and the radicals who devoted their lives to the struggle. | more…

Bit Tyrants The Political Economy of Silicon Valley by Rob Larson

Bit Despotism: The Genesis of High-Tech Monopolies

This article will be released in full online November 25, 2023.

In this review of Bit Tyrants by Rob Larson, Mateo Crossa finds and expands on how the powerful actors of Silicon Valley have fashioned themselves into the new, unapologetic robber barons, operating in the shadows of political lobbying to maintain their monopolistic practices in the Global North while shamelessly engaging in the naked exploitation of the workers in the Global South. Crossa echoes Larson’s call for liberation from these tyrants, bringing attention to the necessity of socialism—both on- and offline—to agitate for democratic control over the technology and Internet platforms that increasingly penetrate our daily lives. | more…

Cover of Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism by Sir E. Ray Lankester

My Notes on ‘The Return of Nature’

This article will be released in full online November 25, 2023.

In August 2020, ecosocialist thinker, MR author, and jazz musician Paul Burkett wrote to MR editor John Bellamy Foster about the latter’s recent book, The Return of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020). Burkett’s short correspondence revealed his deep understanding of the throughline tying the ecologically inspired thought of Marx and Engels to the later innovations of Roy Bhaskar, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and others, all the way up to Foster’s own work demonstrating that these developments are not isolated, but part of an evolving ecosocialist tradition. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 76, Number 5 (October 2024)

October 2024 (Volume 76, Number 5)

It is undeniable that the rapidly worsening ecological crisis is threatening not only future generations, but the youth of today. Why, then, is the U.S. educational system failing to teach students the reality of this human-caused catastrophe? “Even science itself,” MR editors write, “is to be sacrificed on the altar of capital.” | more…

Chart 3. Incremental Output-Capital Ratio (5-Year Trailing Averages), China and the United States, 2000–2005 through 2018–2022

Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation, and the Transition to Socialism: Contradictions of the U.S. and the Chinese Economies since 2000

Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei look to the Chinese and U.S. economies to illustrate the contradictions of secular stagnation, concluding that both economies will likely face great challenges in the decades to come. However, they write, progressive economic policies could change China’s future, encouraging massive investment into the state sector and bringing about the transition to a fully socialist society. | more…

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

Applying/Misapplying Gramsci’s Passive Revolution to Latin America

Steve Ellner deconstructs the argument that Pink Tide governments elected since 2018 are in a state of “passive revolution,” having betrayed their progressive roots through concessions to conservative elements and capital. This analysis, Ellner finds, fails to capture the material impacts of Pink Tide governments, their strategic importance, or their potential to pull societies toward a more radical leftist future. | more…

Paraguayan Sorrow: Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land

Paraguayan Sorrow: Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land

Rafael Barrett was born into the Spanish elite, but in the six intense years that he spent in Paraguay, he shed his past to become one of the most notable voices speaking out against the rampant imperialism gripping Latin America. Arriving in a nation constructed upon a foundation of bones following the Triple Alliance War of 1864-1870, Barrett was thrown by chance into the “Paraguayan sorrow” that haunted that landlocked nation in the heart of Latin America. More than half the population had been wiped out in the merciless conflict. A ferocious pattern of capitalist imperialism had taken hold. The apocalyptic war had ended a

Monthly Review Volume 76, Number 4 (September 2024)

September 2024 (Volume 76, Number 4)

This month’s “Notes from the Editors” recounts the history of U.S. preparations for “prolonged and limited” nuclear war and Washington’s repeated refusal to abide by international agreements regarding nuclear weaponry. With the recent announcement that the United States will be stationing nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles on German soil—within minutes’ striking distance of Moscow—this history is now, troublingly, more relevant than ever. | more…

The Ecological Rift by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York

The Ecological Rift in the Anthropocene

In an interview with Brazilian magazine Margem Esquerda, John Bellamy Foster shares with Fabio Querido, Maria Orlanda Pinassi, and Michael Löwy the formative experiences that contributed to his work as a young activist and, later, a preeminent scholar of ecological Marxism. The interview concludes with a message to the ecological left in Brazil and elsewhere: “Whatever solutions there are to the present planetary crisis must, in historical-materialist terms, arise from concrete social formations, on the basis of which the new revolutionary transformations will take place.” | more…

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California opened a new collaborative research facility yesterday at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies facility in Playa Vista, California

UARCs: The American Universities that Produce Warfighters

Sylvia Martin reveals the deep linkages between U.S. universities and the military-industrial complex through the Department of Defense’s University Affiliated Research Centers. These programs utilize colleges and universities as research and development labs for the U.S. imperial war machine, blurring the lines between ostensibly independent institutions and the military academy and enabling the further expansion and normalization of the warmaking apparatus throughout U.S. society. | more…

Civilian Conservation Corps

Listen to the Ecologists!

In this reprise from 1992, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy look toward the end of the recession then plaguing the United States, seeing choice looming on the horizon: Will the progressive left attempt to reform capitalism, or replace it entirely? Capital’s inexorable thirst for growth beyond natural limits, they write, means we must choose the latter—”if we care about the future of the human species…we had better listen to the ecologists.” | more…

Map showing locations of select strategic U.S. military installations (indicated by stars) along the first and second island chains in the Indo-Pacific.

Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific—An Introduction

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark introduce this summer’s special issue on “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” exploring how the super-region came to be conceptualized among geopolitical strategists and its present-day role in U.S military strategy. “The United States,” they write, “facing the demise of its global hegemonic imperialism, is not only preparing for a Third World War; it is actively provoking it.” | more…

Monthly Review | Tel: 212-691-2555
134 W 29th St Rm 706, New York, NY 10001