The recent arrest of Newsclick editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha is a chilling development in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign of repression against free media. The current “moral panic” being mobilized against Purkayashta, Sam Popowich notes, represents Modi’s attempt to gain popular legitimacy for his Hindutva program and silence dissent. | more…
Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union
Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.
In Until We
What is the state of health care in China? Wei Zhang analyzes the deep institutional issues that plague China’s health care system. Despite its timely and effective efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis, the system still faces deep-seated challenges, many of which can be traced directly to the marketization of hospitals and medical care. | more…
Humanity in this moment faces two major crises: one ecological, growing more acute with every planetary boundary passed; the other social, leading to deprivation and despair across the globe. An effective ecosocialist approach to these crises, Jason Hickel writes, must aim to resolve both in a single stroke. | more…
The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis tells the true tale of a mathematician who found himself taking an involuntary break from chalking equations to sit opposite a row of self-righteous anti-Communist congressmen at the height of the McCarthy era. Courageously asserting the First Amendment to confront a system rapidly descending into fascism, Davis testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He became one of a small number of left wingers who served time for contempt of Congress. | more…
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…
Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. “So how,” Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, “might planning beyond growth look?” It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world. | more…
Lula’s electoral victory may have reinvigorated the Brazilian left, but the destruction wrought by ultraconservative ex-president Jair Bolsonaro presents a monumental task for the new government. Rosa Marques and Paulo Nakatani review the challenges Lula has faced with an eye to those still to come. | more…
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In this prescient article from 1995, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy show that, through their own profligacy, the ruling classes have lost their capacity for political rule. The way forward, Magdoff and Sweezy write, is an “organized, militant struggle,” and with victory necessarily leading to the overthrow of capitalist rule. | more…
“There is no longer any question that the United States is waging a New Cold War,” MR editors write in this month’s “Notes from the Editors.” This war, waged not only against Russia, but increasingly against China, whose approach to global governance is seen as a threat to U.S. imperialism. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
Steve Ellner analyzes the debate surrounding the wave of elections of left-leaning political leaders in Latin America, known as the Pink Tide. Critics of these governments, Ellner suggests, emphasize their shortcomings at the expense of recognizing their anti-imperial position. | more…