Paul Burkett’s death on January 7, 2024, at age 67, means that the world is suddenly bereft of the figure who played the leading role over the last three decades in developing a Marxist ecological economics in the face of the growing planetary crisis. His loss leaves ecological Marxism without its foremost exponent of the ecological critique of capitalist value relations. It also means the loss of a warm and compassionate human being, and a beloved jazz musician. | more…
Christian Noakes tells the story of the struggle to liberate jazz from the exploitative, white-controlled music industry in 1950s and beyond. Recounting the seminal events of the movement and backlash from white civil society, Noakes reveals a legacy of Black cultural autonomy and resistance led by such jazz legends as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, Bill Dixon, and others. | more…
This lyrical vignette from the recently departed Paul Burkett is the author’s final, posthumously published piece for Monthly Review. In it, the eminent ecological economist and jazz musician muses on the nature of creativity, technology, and the corporatization of music—and the struggle to decommodify it, freeing musicians and their craft from the confines of capitalism. | more…
John Bellamy Foster discusses the past and present state of U.S. nuclear policy, asserting that its reliance on belligerent approaches endangers the entire world. “Only a minimalist, as opposed to a maximalist, approach to nuclear arms can put humanity on the road to nuclear disarmament,” he writes, concluding that “the answer lies in a worldwide shift away from dying capitalism to…complete socialism.” | more…
There is a paradox, Benjamin Selwyn and Charis Davis write, at the heart of corporate veganism in the Global North. While vegan products are sold to consumers as environmentally conscious alternatives to meat and dairy, the world’s largest producers of such products are rapacious, ecologically destructive, and exploitive of populations in the Global South. The authors argue that a turn toward socialist veganism can advance the goals of decommodifying and democratizing our food system. | more…
Deciphers the history of “Black capitalist” rhetoric— and how it serves to enrich a minuscule few at the expense of the many
In his 1970 book The Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari Hutchinson laid out a rigorous challenge to the presumption that capitalism, in any shape or form, has the potential to rectify the stark injustices endured by Black people in America. Ofari engaged in a diligent historical review of the participation of African Americans in commercial activity in this capitalist country, demonstrating conclusively that the creation of a class of Black capitalists failed to ameliorate the extreme inequity faced by African Americans. Even “Buy Black”
At the time of writing in late November 2023, Israel has continued its merciless assault on Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands at horrifying rates, as it also condones Israeli settler terrorism against Palestinians living in the West Bank. | more…
Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, examines a recent biography of Irving R. Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death. Using his own deep research into his parents’ case, Meeropol shows how Kaufman’s virulent anti-Communism led him to put his thumb on the scales of justice, despite the later progressive liberalism for which he is often lauded. This in turn reveals a key contradiction: “Liberal democracy is fine as long as the basis of the system is not threatened. When it is…’dangerous’ people—Communists and other leftists—are dealt with by any means necessary.” | more…
In this review of Linda Dittmar’s Tracing Homelands, Paul Buhle writes, “History may yet hold hope when hope is otherwise lacking when we reject the stalemate that only leads to despair.” | 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…
