This issue’s Review of the Month discusses Marx’s role as the foremost revolutionary critic of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism. To this day, his conception of “the universal metabolism of nature” remains a powerful antidote to the phantasmagoric “dark ecology” posited by today’s posthumanism. | more…
![NATO und Totenkopf [NATO and Skull]](https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Nato-Morder-100x146.jpg)
The global balance of power shifting. The resistance to NATO’s push for a New Cold War is growing, particularly among the Third World countries that have historically borne the brunt of the West’s imperial projects. It is the role of socialists living in the imperial core, Paweł Wargan writes, to support the peoples of the Third World as they rise up in the new era. | more…
Pyotr Kondrashov takes a deep dive into Lenin’s understanding of social dialectics. This exploration gives rise to an approach to that places the active human subject squarely in the center of a revolutionary Marxism that goes “beyond Marx,” furthering the struggle for a liberated society. | more…
In this prescient chapter from 1982, author and activist Anne Braden draws a direct line from the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era to state repression of mass movements from the civil rights era to the rapid expansion of the racist police state that continues to this day. This chapter is reprinted from Anne Braden Speaks (Monthly Review Press, 2022). | more…
How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution brings us to the heart of one of the most precarious and transformational moments in Cuba’s evolution. As the Soviet Union fell to pieces in the 1990s, Cuba managed to evade the fate of its primary trading ally. How was this possible, especially as Cuba endured relentless attacks from the capitalist behemoth directly to its north? | more…
A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation
Stay tuned for 2023
“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture.” Guided by the concrete realities of his people, he called for a Return to the Source, a process of decolonization through “re-Africanization.” With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” takes on the Biden Administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, a bellicose document that rattles sabers towards the supposed autocracies of Russia and China while reviving the age-old lie of the United States as protector of democracy. | more…
John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx’s understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only struggle for the advancement of human freedom, but also the capitalist destruction of the earth. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution. | more…
A visit to a Venezuelan commune reveals a fascinating look into the creative ways communards forge ways of life in urban centers, and how these projects intersect with the much-needed transformations required for a grassroots and socially integrated ecology. | more…
The latest Review of the Month, written by Spanish geologist Carles Soriano, considers the implications of idea of the Capitalocene, the historical determinations affecting the study of the Earth Sciences, and how our views of the current planetary crisis are often shaped by inadequate narratives. Current approaches, he writes are “non-dialectic and non-materialist regarding the study of social reproduction modes, and this renders the whole understanding of the planetary crisis not only incomplete but idealist, for the capitalist mode is assumed as absolute rather than historical.” | more…
Two years after the peak of the 2020 street protests for reproductive rights in Poland, Magdalena Muszel and Grzegorz Piotrowski explore the movement’s effects on Polish society. Despite the dissipating energy of the participants and continued intransigence of most major parties, this cycle of protests shifted the values and political preferences of specific gender and age groups, as well as affecting the common perception of protest movements in Poland. | more…
Bhima Koregaon is that rare sequence in Indian politics today that can challenge reveal the true powers of being able to retroactively “change the past” in order to liberate the future, much in the manner of Marx’s historical materialism. The case, Saroj Giri writes, forces us to revisit the question of historical oppression based on caste from within the present, and beckons us to reject the capitalist accelerationist-futurist “progressive politics” of much of the left, taking us closer to the class struggle of Marx. | more…