Situated largely within the Marxist debates on imperialism—but addressing the liberal formulations too—The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism is an important intervention regarding the material basis of imperialism and its three-hundred-year-old history of unequal power relations. The book broadly addresses five issues: (1) the nature of finance capital and the novel yet familiar processes of value extraction; (2) the world of capital; (3) global production networks and labor regimes; (4) the institutional system of nation-states in the new global order; and (5) the nature of integration from colonial regimes to now. | more…
May 2019 (Volume 71, Number 1)
Monthly Review is now seventy years old, with its first issue appearing in May 1949. In this month’s issue, the editors reflect on the legacy of MR, the people who built it, and the ones who keep it going today. | more…
Absolute Capitalism
Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-ideological project of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is a term that is seldom uttered by those in power. Behind this particular ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality. Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological destructiveness that characterizes our time. | more…
Salvador Allende: ‘Not in My Name’
On February 11, 2019, Ariel Dorfman published an article in the Nation, in which he imagined the advice of the late Chilean president Salvador Allende would supposedly offer Nicolás Maduro in order to confront successfully the challenges of the current Venezuelan conjuncture. This is Allende’s fictional reply to Dorfman. | more…
Decolonizing Justice in Tunisia
Building on decades of struggle, the January 2011 Tunisian uprising triggered a wave of popular revolt that spread across North Africa and West Asia. After the uprising, Tunisia became the focus of a celebrated project of transitional justice, which is now the globally mandated method of reconciling victims and perpetrators following a nonrevolutionary regime change. However, Tunisia’s process of transitional justice must be critically examined. The very paradigm employed—that is, the rule of law that transitional justice consistently seeks to impose—is skewed in favor of imperial interests, which can be traced to the paradigm’s origins in the mid–twentieth century victory of European powers over Nazi Germany and its allies. There are other models of justice, however, that are not rooted in this Eurocentric victor’s history, but instead derive from revolutionary traditions. A key one is the People’s Tribunal, used since the late 1960s. The convening of a People’s Tribunal in Tunisia could help amplify and extend the popular-justice claims that surfaced during the country’s recent transitional-justice process. Establishing such a tribunal might help build a symbolic reservoir and organizational force that could ultimately contribute to substantial revolutionary change in the country. | more…
Marx, Animals, and Humans
The December 2018 issue of Monthly Review featured John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark’s “Marx and Alienated Speciesism” and Christian Stache’s “On the Origins of Animalist Marxism: Rereading: Ted Benton and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” both of which take up Ted Benton’s work on animals and Marxism. Here Ted Benton offers a response to the critiques offered by Foster and Clark, and Stache. | more…
Marx and the Critique of Alienated Speciesism
In this continuation of the exchange on “Marx and Alienated Speciesism” and “On the Origins of Animalist Marxism,” John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, and then Christian Stache, reply to Ted Benton. | more…
California’s Migrant Farmworkers
“No one comes out here. No one knows what we go through,” Roberto Valdez, a farmworker in the Coachella Valley town of Thermal, California, tells Gabriel Thompson, the interviewer and editor of Chasing the Harvest, a recently published book of interviews with farmworkers, growers, union activists, teachers, and others. And as one reads through the compelling stories that are told in the collection, one gets a deep sense of what Roberto means, as well as a passionate urge to have others know of the life and work of those who labor in California’s fields. | more…
Unionizing the World’s Largest Slaughterhouse
Capitalism has many victims, but few fare as badly as slaughterhouse workers. Every day, meatpacking workers risk life and limb to provide cheap meat for consumers. Despite this, political scientist Timothy Pachirat once described slaughterhouse work as a form of labor “considered morally and physically repellent by the vast majority of society that is sequestered from view rather than eliminated or transformed.” Yet, slaughterhouses are the sites of some of labor’s greatest triumphs. Lynn Waltz documents one such triumph in her book Hog Wild, which describes how meatpacking workers successfully established a union at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse in North Carolina. While Waltz focuses on the particular fight at the Tar Heel plant, the unionization success of the workers there provides important lessons for future labor struggles. | more…
April 2019 (Volume 70, Number 11)
In the midst of the U.S.-directed coup attempt against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in January–February, Donald Trump delivered a number of verbal attacks on socialism in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The immediate object was to justify U.S. attempts to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic. The less immediate, but hardly less important, goal was to tarnish the growing social democratic (self-styled democratic socialist) movement in the United States, associated with figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In order to safeguard their ambitious social-reform program, the new coterie of Democratic Party socialists have thus sought to separate themselves from Venezuela and other Latin American socialist states, presumably abandoning these countries to their fates at the hands of U.S. imperialism. This raises the historic question of social imperialism—a policy of social reform at home and imperial hegemony abroad. | more…
Searching for Alternatives in Eastern Europe
In the 1960s, Georg Lukács—under the slogan Back to Marx!—called for a “renaissance” of Marxism within Eastern Europe. To understand the nature of this renaissance, we have to understand the many important questions that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 raised for the anti-Stalinist left inside Hungary and Eastern Europe more broadly. This interview looks at efforts to rethink the future of socialism from the Eastern European situation in the second half of the twentieth century, including the political lessons of 1968, the internal fight within the Hungarian Socialist Party, and the continued relevance of V. I. Lenin’s Marxism. | more…