Happy Birthday, Paul!
April 1, 2000
In honor of Paul's 90th birthday, we asked a number of people from different walks of life—trade unionists, radical activists, academics, and longtime friends—to write short tributes to Paul
Article Subjects and Geography: Marxism
Rekindling Socialist Imagination: Utopian Vision and Working-Class Capacities
March 1, 2000
“A continental welfare state, modeled on the comparatively successfulsocial democracy of the United States. That's the ticket. Do it the American way.” This recipe for what path Europe should follow isn't the Economist calling for a new realism, or the voice of American imperialism talking through the Wall Street Journal, or even a stolen quote from a member of Tony Blair's cabinet caught in private conversation. It's the concluding lines of an article on an alternative for Europe published in the New Left Review, once the home and hope for a rejuvenation of creative Marxism
Notes from the Editors, December 1999
December 1, 1999
Recently, we were talking about the environment to a well-known sociologist and got into a fairly heated debate about the ecological effects of capitalism. He insisted that capitalism has nothing to do with it. All human practices, he said, inevitably affect the natural environment and have done so since the dawn of history. This seemed to us a pretty simplistic and ahistorical argument
Marxism, Human Nature, and Social Change
December 1, 1999
Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1998), 203pp., paperback
At a time when politicians, academics, and media pundits celebrate the demise of Marxism as a credible school of thought, and hegemonic “postisms” (e.g., poststructuralism, postfeminism, post-Marxism) have succeeded in producing a generation of young academics for whom everything (themselves included) is “socially constructed” and open to “deconstruction,” in an endless game of shifting identities and “stories,” a book about Marxism and human nature seems hopelessly outdated. It is, however, precisely at this time that this book should be welcome, not only because it is full of illuminating insights that dispel many common stereotypes about Marx and Marxism, but also (and most importantly) because it demonstrates how Marx's theory of human nature, and its social and moral implications, offer a necessary alternative to the current “antinomies of bourgeois thought” (e.g., essentialism vs. anti-essentialism; humanism vs. antihumanism; determinism vs. social constructionism). (I have borrowed this phrase from Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness.)
Notes from the Editors, November 1999
November 1, 1999
We've been discussing among ourselves exactly what we want to achieve with these Notes from the Editors, and our conclusion is that we want to leave the objectives of the Notes as open-ended as they always have been. Over the years, they have been everything from editorials about some pressing current event, to news about the MR community, or reflections on something we've read, including correspondence from our readers. What these all have in common is that they give us a chance to make more or less current comments on things that have happened or things we've been thinking about since the last issue.
Notes from the Editors, July-August 1999
July 1, 1999
In his article on the U.S. economy in this issue, Doug Henwood quotes from a piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, and points to the connection between Friedman's view of globalization and his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Well, we read that article and were very much struck by it too. Anyone who thinks we're over the top when we say things like Ellen did in June's Review of the Month about the “new imperialism” should just read Friedman's “Manifesto for the Fast World.”
Notes from the Editors, June 1999
June 1, 1999
We celebrated our fiftieth anniversary with a dinner on May 7. It was a really marvelous occasion, and we were delighted to see so many of you there. The space was filled to capacity, with 350 people seated, and some who couldn't get seats at the tables were standing —just to enjoy the atmosphere. We were struck not only by the numbers that turned out but by the terrific spirit that permeated the whole affair.
Notes from the Editors, May 1999
May 1, 1999
This issue marks our fiftieth anniversary. We're sure our readers don't need to be told about the odds against a socialist magazine surviving through this particular half century. We began at a time when socialism was a dirty word in the United States, and we're still here today, in fact growing again, after a decade in which people have been abandoning socialism in droves.
Introduction
May 1, 1999
In a human life, attainment of the fiftieth year, while cause for reflection, is nothing exceptional, statistically speaking. For a magazine of the American left, fifty years is a veritable eternity. Simply to reach the age is a stunning achievement
An Interview with Harry Magdoff
May 1, 1999
The twentieth anniversary issue of Monthly Review in May 1969 carried the announcement that Harry Magdoff—the independent economist-had officially joined Paul Sweezy as co-editor, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died in 1968