Revolution is still on the agenda for the global periphery. Restorations in the course of socialist transition are not irrevocable—and in the weak links of the center, breaks in the imperialist front are not inconceivable. | more…
Building on Marx’s own open-ended critique, three revolutionary new developments have recently arisen in Marxist theory, addressing social reproduction, the expropriation of nature, and racial capitalism. | more…
Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” | more…
The decline of Western dominance over the capitalist world system and the concurrent rise of Asia demand a deconstruction of the accepted wisdom of economic history. Understanding the legacy of Eurocentrism in both the rise of capitalism and its historiography is necessary if we are to challenge the dominant discourse and ideological assumptions of the so-called “European miracle.” | more…
The United States was founded as an empire on conquered land, and firearms manufacturing was one of the country’s first successful modern industries. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies. | more…
István Mészáros, who died on October 1 at the age of eighty-six, was a leading Marxist theorist and a frequent contributor to MR. No political philosopher of our age has reached nearly so far in joining philosophy with political-economic critique, or in systematically addressing the question of the movement toward socialism. | more…
With the structural crisis of the capital system, the expansionary historic circle through which capital could dominate humanity for a very long time is perilously closing. That closure brings with it the danger of humanity’s total destruction in the interest of capital’s absurdly prolonged rule. | more…
I first arrived in Mozambique to write about its progress through human-interest stories, through the stories of women. But cracks began to appear in the beautiful façade that independence had constructed. A question insinuated itself: Was it worth it? | more…
In the early years of the Cold War, the academic study of international relations was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. But in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to challenge the reigning orthodoxy. | more…
Longtime readers of Monthly Review would likely agree that the world is a colder, darker place without Doug Dowd, economist, activist, writer, teacher, and friend. He was a rock-bottom radical, a measure of the very best in the human soul. | more…
The political ineffectuality of Marxism in the United States is the consequence most importantly of the nature and history of U.S. capitalism. But also important in explaining this feebleness is what Marxists have and have not done, who they are, and their “style.” | more…
As the global economy grows increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW’s pioneering tactics, and perhaps even the union itself, may again be the means by which working people of all walks secure “the good things in life” while building “a new society within the shell of the old.” | more…