Monthly Review in Historical Perspective
Monthly Review was started in 1949 and is now in its forty-fourth year of publication, so you could say that MR‘s existence is pretty much coterminous with the second half of the twentieth century. What have been the most important characteristics of this half century? | more…
September 2022 (Volume 74, Number 4)
Our current geological time period, characterized by drastic planetary shifts due to anthropogenic climate change, is popularly known as the Anthropocene Epoch. Recent proposals for naming the first age of this epoch highlight capitalism’s central role in the ongoing climate crisis. | more…
Ten Questions About Marx—More Than Twenty Years After ‘Marx’s Ecology’
More than twenty years after the publication of John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000), ecosocialist scholars continue to explore the evolution of Marx’s ecological thinking, from the Greek atomists to his later work on ethnology. | more…
Return of the Dialectics of Nature Debate
John Bellamy Foster’s recent work, The Return of Nature, makes a strong case that Marxism’s central, materialist conception of nature and history makes it the best possible theoretical basis for radical ecological scholarship. | more…
H. Bruce Franklin’s Most Important Books
For nearly sixty years, H. Bruce Franklin has built a body of work that touches on everything Herman Melville to the military-industrial complex to a lowly, little-known fish that is a historical keystone of the U.S. fishing history. | more…
Intelligence Under Racial Capitalism: From Eugenics to Standardized Testing and Online Learning
From the era of overt eugenic research to the present-day education system, the attempts to categorize and rank individuals’ “intelligence” through testing and statistics reflects and reinforces the power of racist, capitalist, and imperialist institutions. | more…
A New Environmental History of Socialist States
Recent scholarship suggests that the widespread perception of Soviet states as uniquely ecologically disastrous is, at best, exaggerated, and that these environmental legacies must be re-examined. | more…
July-August 2022 (Volume 74, Number 3)
Between 1949 and 1980, over a hundred articles in Monthly Review dealt with the Soviet Union directly, with many more addressing it indirectly. But, after 1993, treatments of post-Soviet Russia in the magazine largely ceased. | more…
Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction
Time is running out for humanity to avoid a catastrophic planetary tipping point. Widespread mass mobilizations of populations worldwide must fight to bring about revolutionary societal changes and dismantle neoliberal monopoly capitalism, with its reliance on extractive exploitation of our planet’s resources and communities. | more…
The Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism
A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies. | more…
Surviving Through Community Building in Catastrophic Times
Over the last twenty years, China has gained recognition for its efforts to reduce pollution and remediate the effects of industrialization within its borders. To mitigate the adverse effects of this reality, communities are returning to grassroots projects that present an alternative to unchecked globalization. | more…
Climate Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
Climate imperialism has emerged as a new—and potentially even the most lethal—form of imperialism in the world economy today. Confronting it requires recognizing and dealing with all its different aspects. But it also requires addressing the monopolies of knowledge created by the global regime of intellectual property rights that has been instituted and cemented by hegemonic world powers. | more…
We Only Have One Planet—Defending It Will Require Collective Measures
As climate change and the deforestation of the Amazon alters conditions of life across Latin America, it is clear that planetary defense will require an organized mass movement of all working people against the levers of global capital. | more…