October 1, 2017
The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has always been shaped by the dangers and demands of achieving socialism through democratic means. Only by reckoning with that complexity can we understand both Venezuela's current crisis and its recent history.
July 1, 2017
For this special issue, MR has invited some of the most profound left thinkers in the world to reflect on the legacy of revolutions and counterrevolutions around the world since 1917. Naturally, these authors do not all offer similar perspectives or come to the same conclusions. Nor should they—the historical issues are too complex and the human stakes are too high.
July 1, 2017
If counterrevolution ultimately triumphed over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey of the whole history of imperialist geopolitics over the last century.
July 1, 2017
The October Revolution was the first such event in human history that was theoretically conceived and executed according to a plan. It is this theoretical comprehension of the underlying historical conjuncture that explains the revolution's sweep and energy, the profound changes it wrought in the world, and the extent to which it threatened the very existence of capitalism.
July 1, 2017
The fundamental humanist values of the Russian Revolution still capture the imagination. As an experience of history and a methodology for transforming the world into a community, the revolution's legacy has persisted far beyond the failed experiment of state socialism itself.
July 1, 2017
Post-revolutionary societies, in their efforts to combat counterrevolution, have always been confronted with their own contradictions, and with the persistent threat that an exploiting class could reemerge. Instead of the intended socialization and democratization, in many places what resulted was instead state ownership and stultifying bureaucratization of both the economy and the polity.
July 1, 2017
For a century, the counterrevolutionary reaction to the events of October 1917 has arguably been the most determining ideological factor in Western politics. Today the victory of that counterrevolution is complete, but Western powers still need their inherited antithesis, in changing form, as self-justification.
July 1, 2017
The liberation struggles of peoples in the global South have been and still are closely linked with the challenge to capitalism. Indeed, the conflicts between capitalism and socialism and between North and South are inseparable. No socialism is imaginable outside of universalism, which implies the equality of peoples.
May 1, 2017
To solve the climate crisis, we need a system in which working people and their communities collectively and democratically regulate production and other interactions with their material and social environment. To deny that this crisis is hardwired into capitalism, and that we need a new system to deal with it, is just as misleading and dangerous as to deny the existence of human-induced global warming.
April 1, 2017
Although today there are some setbacks in the region, nobody can deny that there is a huge difference between the Latin America that Hugo Chávez inherited and the Latin America he left us. A new revolutionary subject has been created.