Article Subjects and Geography: Marxism
The Return of Nature and Marx’s Ecology
December 1, 2020
In an interview with Alejandro Pedregal, John Bellamy Foster tells us about the paths great ecosocialist thinkers traveled, the most prominent debates in current Marxist ecological thought, and the urgent need for a project that transcends the conditions that threaten the existence of our planet today.
Notes from the Editors, November 2020
November 1, 2020
In this issue of Monthly Review, we publish two articles marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick Engels. In the attempt to address our planet's ecological crisis, Engels's work has once acquired a renewed importance. His analysis of the dialectics of nature was to play a formative role in the development of modern ecological and evolutionary views and is now being rediscovered in that context.
Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene
November 1, 2020
Today, two hundred years after his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. Engels's contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature's universal metabolism. It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels's work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis.
Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics
November 1, 2020
In grasping emergent qualities and laws on various levels of organization of matter, dialectical theory employs its own conceptual structure, scientific language, and investigation method, and takes a categorially open-ended shape. In this context, Engels provides a remarkable illustration that not only argues for the interconnection and interpenetration of distinct spheres such as chemistry and biology, but also draws on a generative feature of self-organizing systems.
The Mexican and Latino Question: What Is to Be Done?
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.
Notes from the Editors, October 2020
October 1, 2020
This special issue of Monthly Review, "China 2020," is the product of a long period of cooperation with critical Chinese Marxist scholars. This has resulted in an extensive series of articles on contemporary Chinese social and economic relations since 2012, to which most of the authors in the present issue have previously contributed. It takes on a special significance due to the growing conflict between the United States and China, making critical Marxist analysis in this area all the more important.
Tracing a Trajectory of Hope in Rural Communities in China: Survival Bricolage of Zhoujiazhuang and Puhan Rural Community
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.
Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China: The Singularity of the Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune
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.
Negotiating Debt: The Making of Puhan Rural Community in North China
October 1, 2020
Originally set up in 1998 in China, the Puhan Rural Community was the first peasant-initiated, cross-village organization established after the collapse of the top-down people's communes and the implementation of the household responsibility system. Puhan learned a lesson about the exploitation of usurious microfinance and decided that it was capable of establishing a system of mutual aid credit by itself, changing the cultural emphasis on money. Its story of struggling with rural financial organizations opens up a debate on the trap of marketization and monetization, the root causes of loans and debts, the negotiating power of collectives, the production mode of ecological agriculture, and the redefinition of the commonwealth.