January 1, 2018
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.
January 1, 2018
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.
January 1, 2018
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.
January 1, 2018
"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.
December 1, 2017
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.
December 1, 2017
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.
December 1, 2017
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?
December 1, 2017
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.
December 1, 2017
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.
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."