Preface to Beyond Leviathan
The state cannot be other than Leviathan in imposing its structurally entrenched power on overall societal decision-making. Yet a way must be found to extricate humanity from the ever more dangerous, arbitrary, and alienated form of the Leviathan state. Indeed, the survival of humanity depends on it. | more…
Patriarchies East and West
Sara Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is a brave monograph that analyzes the way that the discourses of Europe’s right-wing nationalists, government agencies, and liberal feminists converge in their representations of Muslim and non-western immigrant women, relegating these communities to commodified spheres of social reproductive work. | more…
January 2018 (Volume 69, Number 8)
The recent rise of social reproduction theory represents one of the most remarkable attempts to extend historical materialism in our time. The Review of the Month in this issue, “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” is intended as a contribution to this rapidly growing body of work. | more…
Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution
Examining the historical specificity of women’s lives and labor in England during the Industrial Revolution allows us to better analyze the assumptions regarding gender, family, and work that informed the writings of Marx and Engels—and ultimately to understand how capital as a system threatens the social and ecological bases of human life. | more…
Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment
The United States was founded as an empire on conquered land, and firearms manufacturing was one of the country’s first successful modern industries. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies. | more…
From Wallmapu to Nunatsiavut
Indigenous peoples of the Americas are on the frontlines of resistance to the environmental and social costs of the unthinking drive for capital accumulation. From the United States and Canada to Brazil and Chile, that resistance has been met by state surveillance, repression, and criminalization. | more…
The Propaganda Model Revisited
In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Noam Chomsky and I put forward a “propaganda model” as a framework for understanding how and why the mainstream U.S. media operate within restricted assumptions, depend uncritically on elite sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In this article I describe the model, address some of the criticism leveled against it, and discuss how it holds up today. | more…
What Is Monopoly Capital?
“Monopoly capital” is a term for the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that in the late nineteenth century began to displace the small family firm as the dominant economic unit, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism. | more…
December 2017 (Volume 69, Number 7)
István Mészáros, who died on October 1 at the age of eighty-six, was a leading Marxist theorist and a frequent contributor to MR. No political philosopher of our age has reached nearly so far in joining philosophy with political-economic critique, or in systematically addressing the question of the movement toward socialism. | more…
Capital’s Historic Circle Is Closing
With the structural crisis of the capital system, the expansionary historic circle through which capital could dominate humanity for a very long time is perilously closing. That closure brings with it the danger of humanity’s total destruction in the interest of capital’s absurdly prolonged rule. | more…
Memories of Mozambique
I first arrived in Mozambique to write about its progress through human-interest stories, through the stories of women. But cracks began to appear in the beautiful façade that independence had constructed. A question insinuated itself: Was it worth it? | more…
Cold War Revisionism Revisited
In the early years of the Cold War, the academic study of international relations was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. But in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to challenge the reigning orthodoxy. | more…
Remembering Doug Dowd
Longtime readers of Monthly Review would likely agree that the world is a colder, darker place without Doug Dowd, economist, activist, writer, teacher, and friend. He was a rock-bottom radical, a measure of the very best in the human soul. | more…