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Ángel Prado

Venezuela’s Communal Project

Ángel Prado, a founder of El Maizal Commune and Minister of Communes since 2024, discusses Venezuela’s communal project as both a response to urgent material needs and a long-term strategy for building socialism. Drawing on his experience as a grassroots organizer, he explores how communes are structured, how they relate to the state, and how they embody a vision of popular power. He also reflects on the need for unity within the Chavista movement. | more…

Thousands of workers and peasants convened in 2023 in New Delhi to protest the central government and its policies (CITU)

The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today

This article will be released in full online July 14, 2025.

Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik consider the historical views of the relationship between the proletariat and peasantry during the revolutionary transition to socialism and struggle against imperialism. While other thinkers have suggested that alliances between the two groups must be shed in order to complete the revolution, the Patnaiks propose a framework of voluntary cooperatization benefiting all. | more…

João Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, and federal deputy Maria do Rosário (PT/RS) at the Democracy Camp, in the Pôr do Sol amphitheater, in Porto Alegre, on the banks of the Guaíba River, and near the Regional Federal Court of the 4th Region (TRF4), where former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was tried on January 24, 2018

Land, Cooperation, and Socialism

This article will be released in full online July 28, 2025.

João Pedro Stedile, founder and spokesperson of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), reflects on the movement’s efforts to build a socialist alternative through land occupations, cooperative production, and political education. He highlights the importance of collective struggle and the MST’s deepening ties with Venezuela’s communal movement as part of a broader project to construct a just and solidarious society. | more…

Socioecological Contradictions in the Development of Socialist Collective Farming: Drawing from USSR and Hungarian Histories

This article will be released in full online August 11, 2025.

Through a detailed exploration of the impacts of collective farming on local soils, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro engages in key questions around the past and present of communal agricultural production. These insights shed light on not only specific projects, but future considerations for communal farming, framed by the dialectical relationship of nature and society. | more…

Making Every Yard a Farm and Every Garage a Factory: The Theory and Practice of Cooperation Jackson

This article will be released in full online August 18, 2025.

Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson outlines the ongoing projects and objectives of the Mississippi-based collective Cooperation Jackson. Akuno enumerates the many ways Cooperation Jackson has worked toward improving material conditions and building dual power in support of the Black working and peasant classes in the Mississippi Delta region. | more…

Communal Governance and Production in Rural China Today

This article will be released in full online August 25, 2025.

Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi elucidate the history of China’s People’s Communes as told through the lens of three present-day rural villages. In these villages, they observe the effects of the project’s dismantling and diminishing collective ownership and land management, with the conclusion that a return to collectivism is vital for carrying forward the socialist project. | more…

Prestes Maia Avenue in São Paulo, Brazil

Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

Using data from Brazil’s Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexity of unstable labor dynamics in a world of informal and precarious work. | more…

The Communist Revolution in Gansu

Chinese-Style Modernization: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance

Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China’s successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, “represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony.” | more…

The authors, interviewees, and other attendees at the PARC Symposium

Emerging Oceanic Struggles for No-Nukes in Japan

In this deeply stirring account, Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi share their field research, conducted over years of travel and relationship-building, into the Japanese antinuclear movement. As the people and environment of Fukushima continue to be impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, the No-Nukes movement has grown in response, encompassing aspects of society ranging from artists and monks to fisherfolk and intellectuals. | more…

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Braverman, Monopoly Capital, and AI: The Collective Worker and the Reunification of Labor

December’s Monthly Review begins the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Harry Braverman’s seminal work, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974), with this Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster, which explores the connections between Marx’s “collective worker,” Braverman’s “collective scientist,” and the struggle against the degradation of work in the digital age. | more…

Workers in a fiber optic cable factory

The Classic Transcending Borders and Ages: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘Labor and Monopoly Capital’

What was the impact of Labor and Monopoly Capital in its day, and what is its resonance in ours? Kuang Xiaolu, Li Zhi, and Xie Fusheng take stock of Harry Braverman’s influential scholarship over the last half-century. In sum, they write, “with the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the significance of Labor and Monopoly Capital has long surpassed narrow national boundaries and the era in which Braverman lived.” | more…

Plastic Pollution covering beach in Accra, Ghana

Monopoly Capital and the Rise of the Synthetic Age

Following Harry Braverman’s assertion that we must examine “by way of concrete historical specific analysis of technology…on one side and social relations on the other” in order to understand the impact of the Scientific-Technical Revolution on our daily lives, John Hedlund and Stefano B. Longo describe the explosion of the Synthetic Age of plastics, revealing the commodification of science in service of capital. | more…

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