October 1, 2022
There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx's theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital, young Marx's initial exploration of the term has rarely enjoyed critical attention.
October 1, 2022
Monthly Review was started in 1949 and is now in its forty-fourth year of publication, so you could say that MR's existence is pretty much coterminous with the second half of the twentieth century. What have been the most important characteristics of this half century?
September 1, 2022
More than twenty years after the publication of John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology (2000), ecosocialist scholars continue to explore the evolution of Marx's ecological thinking, from the Greek atomists to his later work on ethnology.
September 1, 2022
John Bellamy Foster's recent work, The Return of Nature, makes a strong case that Marxism's central, materialist conception of nature and history makes it the best possible theoretical basis for radical ecological scholarship.
September 1, 2022
Recent scholarship suggests that the widespread perception of Soviet states as uniquely ecologically disastrous is, at best, exaggerated, and that these environmental legacies must be re-examined.
July 1, 2022
Contradicting previous liberal notions of an "end of history," humanity is now facing unprecedented threats to our species' survival, but an environmental proletariat to combat them is emerging.
March 1, 2022
In Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, István Mészáros closes a trilogy that was first outlined in Marx's Theory of Alienation, later greatly developed in Beyond Capital, and is now concluded in this new work. Throughout his immensely rich work, Mészáros developed, amid many original formulations, an increasingly relevant concept: capital's order of social metabolic reproduction.
March 1, 2022
Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.
February 1, 2022
For Georg Lukács, revolution represented the realm of the objectively possible. He saw the tragedy of action as a necessary element in a movement toward greater human freedom synonymous with historical necessity.
February 1, 2022
Across the humanities and the social sciences, critical attention is being given to the nonhuman as an ecological, philosophical, and political problem—the nonhuman here meaning anything from animals and plants to manufactured objects. Going under names as various as new materialism, political ecology, and object-oriented ontology, these studies comprise a movement that is largely described as the nonhuman turn.
