December 1, 2021
El Maizal's flag-waving communards are rapidly breaking down skepticism about the viability of leader Ángel Prado's election campaign, for it is undeniable that they are among the reddest elements in the so-called Pink Tide.
April 1, 2021
Many factors are involved in COVID-19 mortality rates. Nevertheless, it is clear that the more socialist-oriented countries—by prioritizing social needs and public health, plus aggressive testing, tracing, and enlisting the aid of their populations—have generally been more effective in limiting the effects of the disease on their societies. The failure of the wealthier capitalist countries to do so is largely a result of their prioritization of profits over people.
April 1, 2021
In Socialist Practice, a collection of essays on leftist theory and experiences, Victor Wallis adheres to the view that the achievement of socialism is a drawn out, nonlinear process consisting of episodes that in many cases have a mixed impact on the revolutionary cause. He analyzes several, ranging from the seven decades of Soviet rule to the New Left of the 1960s. His main thesis is that over the last century pure socialism has never existed and that on all fronts socialist movements and governments have contained elements of the old—namely, capitalism.
March 1, 2021
In December 2002, Isabel Crook, a Canadian anthropologist who had spent most of her life in China and a longtime friend and supporter of Monthly Review, wrote a letter to the MR editors questioning the critical nature of coverage of China's capitalist road to socialism since the ascendance of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. This short exchange with Harry Magdoff reflects the complex ways in which dedicated socialists sought to address changes in China and the clarity of the ideas expressed.
February 1, 2021
Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, published in 1908, was an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.
December 1, 2020
In an interview with Alejandro Pedregal, John Bellamy Foster tells us about the paths great ecosocialist thinkers traveled, the most prominent debates in current Marxist ecological thought, and the urgent need for a project that transcends the conditions that threaten the existence of our planet today.
November 1, 2020
In his book Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, Enrique M. Buelna examines the life of Ralph Cuarón, a Mexican-American or Chicano seaman, furniture maker, father, husband, and lifelong activist who joined the Communist Party at age 19 during the Second World War. The Communist Party, however, largely ignored Mexican workers and local members were not pleased with his organizing of that segment of the working class. In the early twenty-first century, the Mexican question remained, although it became known as the "Latino question" after considerable immigration from Central America in the 1980s and '90s. In their book The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes, and the Next Left, Armando Ibarra, Alfredo Carlos, and Rodolfo D. Torres deconstruct the word Latino, arguing that it homogenizes an extremely diverse population.
October 1, 2020
Zhoujiazhuang and the Puhan Rural Community offer contrasting experiences of how communities in different parts of China have responded to, negotiated, and undergone extensive changes during the last forty years since the reform policy was implemented in the country in 1979.
October 1, 2020
Zhoujiazhuang is singular, being the only de facto people's commune in China today. At present, Zhoujiazhuang still maintains the political, economic, and social structure that has been essentially in place since 1956. For over sixty years—since ten years before the Cultural Revolution and thirty-eight years after the dismantling of almost all people's communes in 1982—Zhoujiazhuang has survived as an organizational unit over the same territory comprising the same six natural villages.
October 1, 2020
Originally set up in 1998 in China, the Puhan Rural Community was the first peasant-initiated, cross-village organization established after the collapse of the top-down people's communes and the implementation of the household responsibility system. Puhan learned a lesson about the exploitation of usurious microfinance and decided that it was capable of establishing a system of mutual aid credit by itself, changing the cultural emphasis on money. Its story of struggling with rural financial organizations opens up a debate on the trap of marketization and monetization, the root causes of loans and debts, the negotiating power of collectives, the production mode of ecological agriculture, and the redefinition of the commonwealth.
