December 1, 2017
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."
November 1, 2017
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.
November 1, 2017
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.
November 1, 2017
We have entered a period of history fraught with danger but also rich with revolutionary potential. It is time to move beyond our illusions that electoral politics and reforms of the capitalist state can achieve the revolutionary changes that we all know are urgently needed. As we begin to reorient our struggles there are important lessons to be learned from the recent history of the global South.
November 1, 2017
President Chávez, in line with Marx, identified revolutionary praxis as the key link between human development and practice: "We have to practice socialism…and this practice will create us, ourselves, it will change us; if not we won't make it." From this standpoint, the material product of activity is always accompanied by a second product—the human product. Since the human product has historically been neglected in socialist theories of transition, it is worth considering its significance.
November 1, 2017
Historians have long documented the ways that capitalism drew its early accumulation from the dispossession of commonly owned resources—a process that continues to this day. Building a socialist society and economy can be thought of as a reversal of this process—a reclaiming of commons. The resources that contribute to human development do so best when shared and governed democratically. This includes not only the forests and fields of the pre-capitalist past, but also education and health care systems, parks and streets, waterways, and the shared culture, knowledge, and productive resources of a society.
November 1, 2017
As the global economy grows increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW's pioneering tactics, and perhaps even the union itself, may again be the means by which working people of all walks secure "the good things in life" while building "a new society within the shell of the old."
October 1, 2017
The groups fighting white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere represent a cross-section of the U.S. left, from socialists to communists to anarchists. Together, they affirm that to combat the new right-wing resurgence, it is necessary to combat capitalism itself.
October 1, 2017
The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has always been shaped by the dangers and demands of achieving socialism through democratic means. Only by reckoning with that complexity can we understand both Venezuela's current crisis and its recent history.
October 1, 2017
Benjamin's philosophy presents problems best addressed not academically, but in dialogue with living political processes. And it is in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, that Benjamin's ideas have been most vividly illustrated and interrogated.
