December 1, 2020
Fundamental to Kari Marie Norgaard's Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People is the seizure of land most evident in the overtly violent era of state-sanctioned frontier genocide and forced relocation of the Karuk. Settler colonialism, Norgaard reminds us, is an ongoing state-led project up to this day—it is not just a moment relegated to the past and, thus, the inherent treatment of Native Americans as relics of U.S. history must be challenged.
November 1, 2020
As stated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, health is a fundamental human right. However, we find ourselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with a shortage of both human and material health resources, most of which must be sourced from the private sector. Some of the wealthiest countries—France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have proved unable to respond rapidly. The evolution of public health over the past four decades, during which government health policies have reduced health services to commodities and objects of speculative investment, has led to the current crisis.
November 1, 2020
In his book Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, Enrique M. Buelna examines the life of Ralph Cuarón, a Mexican-American or Chicano seaman, furniture maker, father, husband, and lifelong activist who joined the Communist Party at age 19 during the Second World War. The Communist Party, however, largely ignored Mexican workers and local members were not pleased with his organizing of that segment of the working class. In the early twenty-first century, the Mexican question remained, although it became known as the "Latino question" after considerable immigration from Central America in the 1980s and '90s. In their book The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes, and the Next Left, Armando Ibarra, Alfredo Carlos, and Rodolfo D. Torres deconstruct the word Latino, arguing that it homogenizes an extremely diverse population.
October 1, 2020
Zhoujiazhuang and the Puhan Rural Community offer contrasting experiences of how communities in different parts of China have responded to, negotiated, and undergone extensive changes during the last forty years since the reform policy was implemented in the country in 1979.
October 1, 2020
Zhoujiazhuang is singular, being the only de facto people's commune in China today. At present, Zhoujiazhuang still maintains the political, economic, and social structure that has been essentially in place since 1956. For over sixty years—since ten years before the Cultural Revolution and thirty-eight years after the dismantling of almost all people's communes in 1982—Zhoujiazhuang has survived as an organizational unit over the same territory comprising the same six natural villages.
September 1, 2020
Crisis reveals the fault lines in society. COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on our health and killing us in large numbers, bringing with it the most massive and steep economic collapse in U.S. history. Then, there was the murder of George Floyd and the resulting astonishing global protests against racism. Anyone can see that capitalism, facing no real opposition in decades, has reverted to its default position: only profit rules us and those with money will beat down those with none, without mercy or remorse.
September 1, 2020
Among ethnic disasters of the past few decades, few can match in intensity or have been reported in the media more extensively than those of the Indigenous in Guatemala. The social structure of the nationÑits hierarchy, driven by a light-skinned population, most of whom are ethnically mestizo but who do not identify with the purely IndigenousÑits history, and its small size make it an important site for the documentation and reporting of ethnic disputes and differences.
September 1, 2020
A new poem by Marge Piercy.
July 1, 2020
The entire United States has been upended by weeks of protests, extending to over 150 cities, sparked by the racist police murder of George Floyd. The present special issue of Monthly Review is devoted to exploring the complex interweaving of the classical Marxian critique with the rapidly developing critique of racial capitalism.
July 1, 2020
Indigenous and African resistance and intellectual traditions provide key insights to the very nature of capitalism and how it has unfolded throughout space and time, its tentacles emanating from Europe and stretching across the globe in the forms of imperialism and colonialism.
