Moving the Bar: Michael Ratner, Social Justice, and a Life Defending the Revolution
There are a thousand ways to be a radical lawyer. Michael Ratner’s magnificent Moving the Bar gives a tantalizing taste of how one person, with his increasing band of colleagues, defended movements for social justice and revolution during his lifetime. | more…
Cuba and the United States
This exchange appeared in the September 1961 issue of Monthly Review. The questions were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by Leo Huberman during the week of the Bay of Pigs invasion; the answers were received at the end of June. | more…
‘El Patojo’
A few days ago, a cable brought the news of the death of some Guatemalan patriots, among them Julio Roberto Cáceres Valle. In this difficult job of a revolutionary, in the midst of class wars which are convulsing the entire continent, death is a frequent accident. But the death of a friend, a comrade during difficult hours and a sharer in dreams of better times, is always painful for the person who receives the news, and Julio Roberto was a great friend. | more…
The Eyes of Texas and the Nays
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
November 2021 (Volume 73, Number 6)
There is an urgent need to transcend the deep chasm in historical materialism, extending back to the 1920s, between the Western Marxist philosophical tradition and the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals. This division has been closely associated with so-called Western MarxismÕs rejection of the dialectics of nature. | more…
The Planetary Rift
The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift. | more…
World Development under Monopoly Capitalism
As the internationalization of monopoly capital grows, particularly through the domination of global value chains, the worldwide rate of exploitation and degree of monopoly increase as well. | more…
The Present in History, 2021
The job of socialists is to engage with public policy from a class perspective, informed by a Marxist understanding of contemporary capitalism—not to reform it, but to abolish it. | more…
Disney, Salò, and Pasolini’s Inconsumable Art
The increasing consolidation of the modern entertainment industry by a small clique of multinational streaming giants is the next step in the “standardization of style” in mass-consumed art. The work of Pier Paolo Pasolini can help remind us of what we’re missing. | more…
Keeping the Challenges Before Us
The reissuing of Reluctant Reformers can inform our attempts to grapple with how the unity of the oppressed can be forged in such a way that the interests of the historically marginalized do not continue to get…well, marginalized. | more…
The great indifference
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
October 2021 (Volume 73, Number 5)
What was most significant about the published Part I of the report was that it revealed that even in the most optimistic projection of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways—in which carbon emissions globally peak in the next four years, a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature over preindustrial levels would be avoided until 2040, and the goal of net zero carbon emissions would be reached by 2050—the consequences for global humanity would nonetheless be catastrophic by the measure of all historical precedents. | more…
The Long Haitian Revolution
The current situation in Haiti has roots in the historical struggle of the Haitian people, and is part of the endless retribution from imperial powers for its revolution. | more…