March 1, 2026
Vijay Prashad critiques the argument that colonialism was, at most, ancillary to the transition between capitalism and feudalism in Western Europe. Instead, Prashad argues, "capitalism
as it historically emerged—industrial, global, racialized, and imperial—was inseparable from colonial expropriation." This reality must fuel a Marxist conception of the global struggle for reparations for those who have been oppressed and exploited at the hands of empires past and present.
November 1, 2025
In this far-reaching analysis, Vijay Prashad enumerates the conditions of the current conjuncture that, despite seemingly intractable capitalist and imperialist hegemony, point to a reinvigorated revolutionary consciousness among the global population. In a world of capitalist degradation, Prashad declares: "A politics to produce dignity is a socialist politics…. Capitalism inherently generates forms of inequality and indignity. Therefore, all undertakings that seek dignity for all are socialist projects."
November 1, 2025
Paul Buhle reviews
Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, a new biography of the seminal—yet previously lesser known—activist and journalist, Hubert Harrison. Through this new intellectual and cultural study of Harrison's remarkable life and work, Buhle writes, author Brian Kwoba tells a story of a man ahead of his time in challenging white supremacy and capitalism through Black radical thought.
October 1, 2025
Paul Buhle reviews two books by renowned leftist Tariq Ali. In these two texts, Buhle writes, one can read and discern a history of the UK left. Through Ali's autobiography, Buhle writes, readers can experience the ups and downs of various factions, from the Labour Party to Trotskyist journals; through his memoirs, we get a sense of Ali's deep insights, drawn from his extensive travels and a life deeply embedded in history.
June 1, 2022
What made István Mészáros's life so fascinating, and relevant to issues of socialist construction, was that, having seen both sides of the Cold War, he came to perceive both "real socialism" and twentieth-century capitalism as two variants of the same system. He called this the capital system. The basic commonality among most countries of both the East and the West in the twentieth century was the extraction of surplus labor from workers who did not control their own work processes.
June 1, 2022
István Mészáros was a global thinker strongly committed to anti-imperialist struggles. In this respect, he allied himself with those fighting for socialist transformation in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere. He argued that in the descending phase of capitalism there was a "downward equalization of the rate of exploitation," by which he meant a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, enforced by a global system of monopolistic competition.
June 1, 2022
Increasing numbers of left-wing activists around the world are turning to Vincent Bevins's The Jakarta Method to learn more about the horrific atrocities committed by the United States against peoples' struggles for the right to self-determination in the so-called postcolonial era. In particular, the book describes how imperialist expansion destroyed revolutionary struggles in the third world.
December 1, 2021
This exchange appeared in the September 1961 issue of Monthly Review. The questions were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by Leo Huberman during the week of the Bay of Pigs invasion; the answers were received at the end of June.
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.
