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…
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
The International Monetary Fund, part of the Bretton Woods Agreement that helped establish the current rules of the U.S.-dominated international capitalist system, claims to aim for a world of prosperity through so-called free trade. In Latin America, David Barkin and Juan Santarcángelo write, the IMF has contributed to the impoverishment of the working class and destruction of these countries’ ecological legacies. But what does the future hold for the IMF in Latin America? | more…
Oscar Feo Istúriz reviews Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation, an extensive work that explores the concept of collective health, from its early basis in classical Marxism to its contemporary implementation in Latin America (and lack thereof in the United States). This model of social medicine-collective health has the potential to not only replace the dysfunctional model of public health under capitalism, but open up new pathways toward profound social transformation. | more…
Andy Higginbottom analyzes the influence of Ruy Mauro Marini on dependency theory and the concept of superexploitation. Marini, he explains, carried Marx’s legacy forward—but there is still work to be done in the twenty-first century. | more…
Steve Ellner analyzes the debate surrounding the wave of elections of left-leaning political leaders in Latin America, known as the Pink Tide. Critics of these governments, Ellner suggests, emphasize their shortcomings at the expense of recognizing their anti-imperial position. | more…
This poem was published in volume 18, number 4, of Monthly Review (September 1966). | more…
Forthcoming in June 2021
In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by U.S.-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela. | more…
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. | more…
In his book Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, Enrique M. Buelna examines the life of Ralph Cuarón, a Mexican-American or Chicano seaman, furniture maker, father, husband, and lifelong activist who joined the Communist Party at age 19 during the Second World War. The Communist Party, however, largely ignored Mexican workers and local members were not pleased with his organizing of that segment of the working class. In the early twenty-first century, the Mexican question remained, although it became known as the “Latino question” after considerable immigration from Central America in the 1980s and ’90s. In their book The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes, and the Next Left, Armando Ibarra, Alfredo Carlos, and Rodolfo D. Torres deconstruct the word Latino, arguing that it homogenizes an extremely diverse population. | more…
Mike Gonzalez’s new biography of JosŽ Carlos Mari‡tegui is an important attempt to introduce the Peruvian socialist to an English-speaking audience. It constitutes not so much a rediscovery of Mari‡tegui, but is itself part of a slow but steady embrace of a novel and innovative thinker broadly credited with the creation of a Latin American Marxism. | more…
Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press author, world socialist activist, and theorist of revolution, Marta Harnecker, died on June 15, 2019, at age 82. In her memory, we republish an exchange between her and Greek journalist Tassos Tsakiroglou, conducted in advance of the 2017 conference on 150 Years of Marx’s Capital: Reflections for the Twenty-First Century. | more…