Top Menu

Imperialism

Monthly Review Volume 73, Number 3 (July-August 2021)

July-August 2021 (Volume 73, Number 3)

This special issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the New Cold War on China. What has been the view of the Chinese Revolution presented in Monthly Review in the past seven decades? How has it changed over time? As Paul A. Baran observed: “Marx and in particular Lenin being master-tacticians shifted horses and arguments as conditions changed (rightly so, to be sure!)” The question then becomes not the changing views themselves, but how these shifts in perspective reflect changing historical circumstances. | more…

US-China competition can avoid confrontation

The New Cold War on China

The imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project. In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. The Biden administration has made it clear that it not only intends to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it. | more…

A McDonald's in China

China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?

Whether China has become an imperialist country is a question of crucial importance for the global class struggle. Although China has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters, on the whole, China continues to transfer a greater amount of surplus value to the core countries in the capitalist world system than it receives from the periphery. China is thus best described as a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system. | more…

CHINA THREAT by Luo Jie

China and the American Lake

U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence. | more…

Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer

Epidemic Response

The Legacy of Colonialism

The COVID-19 pandemic is at its root a crisis of globalization, racial capitalism, colonialism, the social organization of our public health system. It is a crisis of treatment and care versus demonization and wall building. And it is the latest pandemic in a long line of modern onesÑfrom SARS to swine flu to HIV to EbolaÑa predictable and predicted outcome, not the mysterious unforeseeable lightning strike as it is often portrayed. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 73, Number 1 (May 2021)

May 2021 (Volume 73, Number 1)

In 1884, important figures in England’s budding socialist movement broke with the Social Democratic Federation over concealed jingoism and strong support for the British Empire. A similar division within the broad left on the issue of imperialism is threatening to reappear in our time. | more…

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, joined by the Presidential Cabinet members, pose for a Cabinet portrait Thursday, April 1, 2021, in the Grand Foyer of the White House

The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes

Climate and China

We can analyze the new Biden administration, its personnel, and the policies it is likely to follow, especially on the all-important questions of the climate crisis and U.S. grand strategy toward China, by looking at the Council on Foreign Relations. | more…

"Dollar hegemony" by Luo Jie for China Daily

Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism

Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Neoimperialism, the specific contemporary phase of historical development, can be summed up on the basis of five key features: the new monopoly of production and circulation; the new monopoly of finance capital; the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property; the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance; and the economic essence and general trend. | more…

Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today

Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today

New!

Even if you don’t know much about the war in Vietnam, you’ve probably heard of “The Hanoi Hilton,” or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming-home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn’t acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. | more…