July 1, 2023
Chris Gilbert examines the ecological aspects of Venezuela's project of communal socialism, as well as its relation to the country's inherited extractive economy. These democratically run communities present an alternative to the extractivist and productivist social relations driving the planet to ruin.
July 1, 2023
As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth.
July 1, 2023
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx's understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. "Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology," he writes, "planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality."
July 1, 2023
Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. "So how," Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, "might planning beyond growth look?" It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world.
June 1, 2023
In popular thought, the youth and student movements of France May 1968 have been linked with the thinkers of what is known as French theory. Gabriel Rockhill considers the actual, less-than-revolutionary actions of these popular philosophers in the student revolts, then turns our attention to a deeper question: Who benefits from drawing these tenuous connections?
June 1, 2023
Gregory Elich interviews George T. Mudimu, a Zimbabwe-based agrarian specialist, about present-day land struggles in Zimbabwe, two decades after the institution of the Fast Track Land Reform Program.
May 1, 2023
The working class is being robbed, both through outright expropriation and the more hidden exploitation of countless workers who are struggling to make ends meet while capitalists pocket the surplus value they produce. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster dissect the neoliberal assault on the working class that is spurring a new generation of labor organizing.
May 1, 2023
Lula's electoral victory may have reinvigorated the Brazilian left, but the destruction wrought by ultraconservative ex-president Jair Bolsonaro presents a monumental task for the new government. Rosa Marques and Paulo Nakatani review the challenges Lula has faced with an eye to those still to come.
May 1, 2023
First published in 1952, I. F. Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War was a stunning indictment of the U.S. war machine and the mass media's unquestioning acceptance of the government's deception. In their new introduction, Tim Beal and Gregory Elich explore Hidden History's continuing relevance to current events, including the rapidly escalating New Cold War.
May 1, 2023
In this prescient article from 1995, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy show that, through their own profligacy, the ruling classes have lost their capacity for political rule. The way forward, Magdoff and Sweezy write, is an "organized, militant struggle," and with victory necessarily leading to the overthrow of capitalist rule.
