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…
Marxism for the Few
The political ineffectuality of Marxism in the United States is the consequence most importantly of the nature and history of U.S. capitalism. But also important in explaining this feebleness is what Marxists have and have not done, who they are, and their “style.” | more…
Movement as a Political Act
Amid deep disparities between states, the act of moving across borders becomes a way of re-politicizing the very idea of states, borders, and nations—concepts that have for centuries been taken for granted and excluded from debate. | more…
November 2017 (Volume 69, Number 6)
Over the last three decades, Monthly Review has stood out as a major source of ecosocialist analysis. This has been especially evident in recent months, with the publication by Monthly Review Press of three pathbreaking books: Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy; Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism; and Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. | more…
The Long Ecological Revolution
From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large—over decades and centuries. However, given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation. | more…