And then, I think about war
A new poem by Linda Backiel. | more…
Another Gray Afternoon in Guernica
A new poem by Kenneth Salzmann, author of The Last Jazz and Other Poems. | more…
January 2020 (Volume 71, Number 8)
Notes from the Editors
The coup against the Bolivian government under Evo Morales came straight out of the latest political-military manuals of the U.S. imperial state. These manuals provide instructions on how systematically to undermine the reputation of a popular, elected leader with accusations of dictatorship, corruption, and various other forms of character assassination in order to soften support on the left. Moreover, these manuals provide step-by-step instructions on how to prepare the political and military bases of a coup. | more…
Indonesia 1965, Half a Century Later
In The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Geoffrey B. Robinson offers the most comprehensive history of Indonesia’s mass killings to date, arguing that the army, foreign governments, and monopoly capital must all be jettisoned from the country’s ruling coalition for meaningful justice to be achieved. | more…
The Angler and the Octopus
Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive
Ever since the United States divided the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea has had to cope with the existential challenge of U.S. hostility. Korea marks the western boundary of the empire, a border area where the sea power of the United States adjoins the land power of Russia and China. North Korea has been able to utilize this liminality to create a sovereign stateÑthe Democratic People’s Republic of KoreaÑwhose independence is not welcomed by either Moscow or Beijing but tolerated because the alternatives, a client of the other or absorption into the U.S. empire, are considered worse. Washington, as global hegemon, has been less willing to tolerate this independence but has faced constraints. The result has been a policy of hostility, of unrelenting diplomatic and economic war of varying intensity, stopping short of actual kinetic war, though never far from it. | more…
U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony
Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press author and celebrated world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein died on August 31, 2019. In his memory, we republish an article that first appeared in Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (JulyÐAugust 2003). | more…
Shamrocks and Oil Slicks: A People’s Uprising Against Shell Oil in County Mayo, Ireland
County Mayo, Ireland, is spectacularly beautiful. Dolphins, whales, and seals frolic in bays, rivers teem with salmon. Into this tranquil, unspoiled region, in early 2002, came Shell Oil, announcing plans to build a gas refinery. Shell promised wonderful things: new jobs, improved roads, money for schools. Church officials called this project a “godsend,” while honest, hard-working families, who had lived in Mayo for generations, certainly saw no harm in the project. But when the citizens of County Mayo realized what Shell actually intended to do, they rose up. Shamrocks & Oil Slicks tells the story of County Mayo—the fishermen, farmers, teachers, business people—who, motivated by love for their environment, their community, and their country, fought one of the planet’s most powerful destroyers to a standstill. | more…
Socialist Internationalism Against the European Union
Costas Lapavitsas’s The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2019) is recognized as the leading work advocating Lexit, the left-wing case for Brexit, and for nations leaving the European Union more generally. In light of current Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s commitment to exit the European Union by October 31, even if it means a no-deal Brexit, the role of the left takes on growing importance. Moreover, this raises issues of the European Union generally, including the dominance of neoliberalism within it and the question of German hegemony. Here, Neil Davidson offers an assessment of Lapavitsas’s book. | more…
Navigating the Brexit Strait
In this continuation of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Andy Storey engages with Costas Lapavitsas’s arguments in The Left Case Against the EU. | more…
Learning from Brexit
A Socialist Stance Toward the European Union
As part of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Costas Lapavitsas provides an extensive response to Neil Davidson’s and Andy Storey’s contributions. | more…
A Duel of Dreams
Naomi Klein’s The Battle for Paradise (Haymarket, 2018) describes a duel of dreams for post-Hurricane Mar’a Puerto Rico. On the one hand, networks of resistance and resilience sprang up around the island in the wake of the collapse of not just trees and houses, but infrastructure and government. On the other, a small group of super rich speculators and futurists were poised to cash in on what Puerto Rico’s then-Governor Ricardo Rossell—ó described as an opportunity to “sort of restart and upgrade” a nation he shamelessly called a “blank canvas.” Rossell—ó— was forced out of office on July 24, 2019, by mass protests, in large part thanks to the networks of resistance and resilience that came to life when the government essentially disappeared after the 2017 hurricanes. | more…
Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism
Winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy – Paul A. Baran Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains—vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals—Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx’s own theory of exploitation. | more…