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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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September 1, 2020
A new poem by Marge Piercy.
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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.
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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.
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July 1, 2020
In recent years, "racial capitalism" has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.
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July 1, 2020
Organized labor—based on white-exclusive and later white-dominated, though not necessarily exclusive, trade unions—formed itself as part of the settler state, not in the sense of being an apparatus of the state, but in the sense of accepting certain important precepts. The unions took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, conceived that the unions were to exist to serve the "legitimate" population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population.
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