Historians have long documented the ways that capitalism drew its early accumulation from the dispossession of commonly owned resources—a process that continues to this day. Building a socialist society and economy can be thought of as a reversal of this process—a reclaiming of commons. The resources that contribute to human development do so best when shared and governed democratically. This includes not only the forests and fields of the pre-capitalist past, but also education and health care systems, parks and streets, waterways, and the shared culture, knowledge, and productive resources of a society. | more…
As the global economy grows increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW’s pioneering tactics, and perhaps even the union itself, may again be the means by which working people of all walks secure “the good things in life” while building “a new society within the shell of the old.” | more…
Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump’s moral and political emergency—and to resist it. | more…
The groups fighting white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere represent a cross-section of the U.S. left, from socialists to communists to anarchists. Together, they affirm that to combat the new right-wing resurgence, it is necessary to combat capitalism itself. | more…
The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has always been shaped by the dangers and demands of achieving socialism through democratic means. Only by reckoning with that complexity can we understand both Venezuela’s current crisis and its recent history. | more…
Benjamin’s philosophy presents problems best addressed not academically, but in dialogue with living political processes. And it is in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, that Benjamin’s ideas have been most vividly illustrated and interrogated. | more…
Despite its inherent hazard of excess capacity, capitalism is distinguished by the vast, long-run expansion of its productive forces. How come? To answer this, we need to move from theory to history. | more…
As the smoke clears from the collapse of revolutionary societies from Eurasia to Central America, analysts are searching for the crucial points of weakness that led to the failure of these “socialist experiments.” In Gathering Rage, writer, poet, and activist Margaret Randall describes how two of these revolutions, in Nicaragua and in Cuba, addressed or failed to address a feminist agenda.
Writing as both observer and participant, Randall vividly describes how, in each case, to varying degrees, and in different ways, women’s issues were gradually pushed aside. Combining anecdotes with analysis, she shows how distorted visions of liberation and shortcomings in practice left a legacy that
The present Russia panic follows an entire century of fearmongering and “threat inflation,” dating to the Russian Revolution, that has long served the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex and security state. It has had little to do with either Russian or American realities, which have been consistently distorted. | more…
Scholars, scientists, politicians, and others are moved to write about climate change for a variety of reasons, including scientific advance, political influence, and public education. For the late Del Weston, the reason was clearly love—for people and for the earth. | more…
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. During those years, Baran, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Sweezy, a former professor of economics at Harvard, then co-editing Monthly Review in New York City, were separated by three thousand miles. Their intellectual collaboration required that they write letters to one another frequently and, in the years closer to 1964, almost daily. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. | more…
