June 1, 2019
Situated largely within the Marxist debates on imperialism—but addressing the liberal formulations too—The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism is an important intervention regarding the material basis of imperialism and its three-hundred-year-old history of unequal power relations. The book broadly addresses five issues: (1) the nature of finance capital and the novel yet familiar processes of value extraction; (2) the world of capital; (3) global production networks and labor regimes; (4) the institutional system of nation-states in the new global order; and (5) the nature of integration from colonial regimes to now.
May 1, 2019
The December 2018 issue of Monthly Review featured John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark's "Marx and Alienated Speciesism" and Christian Stache's "On the Origins of Animalist Marxism: Rereading: Ted Benton and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," both of which take up Ted Benton's work on animals and Marxism. Here Ted Benton offers a response to the critiques offered by Foster and Clark, and Stache.
May 1, 2019
In this continuation of the exchange on "Marx and Alienated Speciesism" and "On the Origins of Animalist Marxism," John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, and then Christian Stache, reply to Ted Benton.
April 1, 2019
In the 1960s, Georg Lukács—under the slogan Back to Marx!—called for a "renaissance" of Marxism within Eastern Europe. To understand the nature of this renaissance, we have to understand the many important questions that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 raised for the anti-Stalinist left inside Hungary and Eastern Europe more broadly. This interview looks at efforts to rethink the future of socialism from the Eastern European situation in the second half of the twentieth century, including the political lessons of 1968, the internal fight within the Hungarian Socialist Party, and the continued relevance of V. I. Lenin's Marxism.
April 1, 2019
This reprise of "The Debs Way"—the text of an address Leo Huberman delivered at the Debs Centennial Meeting held at the Fraternal Clubhouse in New York City on November 28, 1955—not only reminds us of the importance of Eugene V. Debs to the history of socialism in the United States, but also brings out some of the core beliefs of Huberman's own approach to socialism. While today's conditions are of course vastly different from when the address was delivered more than sixty years ago, the basic principles that Huberman derives from Debs remain relevant.
April 1, 2019
In the Notes from the Editors of the January 2019 issue of Monthly Review, the editors commented on a blog post by Michael Roberts on the term financialization. In the first part of this short exchange Roberts questions whether financialization is a meaningful and useful term, or simply a distraction from a comprehensive critique contemporary capitalism.
April 1, 2019
There has been a tendency within liberal analysis of financialization to place an emphasis on the trees, that is, the various speculative mechanisms, rather than the forest, or the growth of finance in relation to production. The reason for this stress on the trees rather than the forest is that, in contemporary capitalist ideology, financialization cannot be brought seriously into question since it is part of the entire architecture of accumulation.
April 1, 2019
Germany is commonly perceived as a strong, dependable island amid a sea of gyrating European uncertainties, a down-to-earth, dependable ally in attempts by the better U.S. presidents to move the world forward as steadily as possible. For the past thirteen years, this view has been personified in the clear, undramatic words and deeds of Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany since 2005. Considerable doubts in this appraisal, with evidence that Germany, like every other country, has never been a monolith free of class conflict and other contradictions, are addressed in Oliver Nachtwey's Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe, out now from Verso Books. In describing West German, then all-German, developments from the end of the Second World War until the present, Nachtwey analyzes from the left, unafraid to utilize the ideas of Karl Marx as well as a host of more recent analysts of many shades.
April 1, 2019
Revolting Prostitutes reminds readers that this struggle is at once bigger than any one sex worker's immediate needs, but also must be precisely driven by these day-to-day needs. While this might at first seem contradictory, the book emphasizes how the collective workforce is constituted by individual workers with varied experiences, all of which are unique and valid. Narrative matters and, with Revolting Prostitutes, we are gifted one shaped by nuanced, considerate, care-informed members of the impacted working community.
March 1, 2019
Following two key themes in Karl Marx's thought—estrangement and political economy, in their relation to human self-knowledge—labor mediates the social metabolism. In this schema, organic (or functional) metabolism is distinguished from extended metabolism (or social organization). Socially extended metabolism gives rise to shared values and concepts in the same way that organic metabolism gives rise to life. On this basis, I suggest that both the subject and object of human self-knowledge is a socially extended self, which can connect to itself only when humans freely participate in socially extended metabolism—that is, economy, science, and industry. Estrangement, in contrast, is seen to result from a disruption within socially extended metabolism.
