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.
November 1, 2021
There is an urgent need to transcend the deep chasm in historical materialism, extending back to the 1920s, between the Western Marxist philosophical tradition and the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals. This division has been closely associated with so-called Western MarxismÕs rejection of the dialectics of nature.
November 1, 2021
The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift.
October 1, 2021
In order to commit murder or mayhem under this program, vouchers must be submitted within one week prior to the actions contemplated or within a month afterward. Persons who commit violent acts without valid vouchers will be asked to enter into Voluntary Consent Agreements to desist from unauthorized murder or mayhem, and up to one tenth of any ill-gotten gains will be donated voluntarily to the charity of their choice, without any implication of admission of guilt.
April 1, 2021
Engels was neither a reductionist nor a positivist, and, far from being a political fatalist, he embraced a form of interventionist politics that was underpinned by a historically emergent ethics. It was this standpoint that he aimed to philosophically ground in Dialectics of Nature.
March 1, 2021
A prolific political writer, Álvaro Cunhal—leader of Portugal's Communist Party for half a century and central figure of the 1974 Carnation Revolution—revealed in 1994 that he had also written several novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. One of these novels, Five Days, Five Nights, was only translated into and published in English in 2020. The novella manages to capture the complexities, loneliness, and bravery of ordinary people, highlighting how we are the ones who keep us safe.
February 1, 2021
Although natural constraints on supply are important, most economic scarcities that rule our lives are actually social and artificial. Supply and demand are not natural forces drifting through the air; they are contrived realities established by an interactive social environment involving governments, corporations, institutions, and classes. Supply and demand cycles are social constructs designed to answer a basic question: Who gets what?
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.
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.
