#MeToo
An original poem by award-winning writer Wilderness Sarchild. | more…
Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power
“Mythologies,” writes veteran human rights lawyer Michael Tigar, “are structures of words and images that portray people, institutions, and events in ways that mask an underlying reality.” For instance, the “Justice Department” appears, by its very nature and practice, to appropriate “justice” as the exclusive property of the federal government. In his brilliantly acerbic collection of essays, Tigar reveals, deconstructs, and eviscerates mythologies surrounding the U.S. criminal justice system, racism, free expression, workers’ rights, and international human rights. | more…
October 2018 (Volume 70, Number 5)
This issue is dedicated to remembering the life and work of Samir Amin (1931–2018), the greatest single theorist of imperialism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and one of the leading world activists and organizers in today’s anti-imperialist struggle. | more…
The Radicalization of Dashiell Hammett
In his review of Hardboiled Activist: The Work and Politics of Dashiell Hammett by Ken Fuller, Albert Ruben debunks popular arguments about Hammett’s consistent radicalism. Instead, he highlights Fuller’s research to point to Hammett’s process of radicalization—from nihilism to communism—and the events that shaped his life and work. | more…
Beyond the Class–Race Binary
In his insightful new book, the historian David Roediger raises critical questions for scholar-activists seeking to understand white racism and contemporary capitalism and its class realities. He joins a long line of thinkers who have clearly recognized the need for both specifically racial and more universal, class-oriented programs of major social and economic change. | more…
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…
No Empires, No Dust Bowls
Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History
When scientists describe the increase of Dust Bowl-like conditions under climate change, they signal a particular kind of violent ecological and social change. But equally violent are the social forces, historical developments, policies, and practices that produce such massive socioecological crises in the first place. | more…
Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures
Millions of Americans face increasing difficulty finding well paying, secure jobs. But the current employment crisis is not so much due to the educational system as it is to a sustained corporate effort to keep the public in ignorance about the damage wrought by the global economy itself. Miseducating for the Global Economy reveals that behind the going concern for “global economy education” lies capitalism’s metastasizing indifference to human values, to a fair distribution of resources, to its radical restructuring of workplaces with an attendant intensification of work effort, and to the genuine well-being of workers and their families. | more…
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…
A Marxist Correspondence
Paul A. Baran (1910–1964) and Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) were two of the most creative and influential Marxist economists of the last century. The Age of Monopoly Capital collects hundreds of letters between Baran and Sweezy, written between 1949 and Baran’s death in 1964. The correspondence contains numerous interesting, important, and unanticipated ideas. Nuggets of wisdom about economic theory, socialist history, dialectical method, academic politics, and many other topics are scattered throughout. | more…
Two Intellectual Giants of the American Left
Instead of theory, early U.S. radicals excelled in reportage, like John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, or fiction, like Upton Sinclair’s packing-house shocker The Jungle. To Europeans American thought seemed impermeable to the difficult ideas of Marxism. That changed with the founding of Monthly Review in 1949, which marked a newly realized if not entirely new trend in American Marxist thought. | more…
The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce
Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The Cold War, waged between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 until the latter's dissolution in 1991, was a great tragedy, resulting in millions of civilian deaths in proxy wars, and a destructive arms race that diverted money from social spending and nearly led to nuclear annihilation. The New Cold War between the United States and Russia is playing out as farce—a dangerous one at that. The Russians Are Coming, Again is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies. | more…