What is “Red Africa”? Through an extended treatment of Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (Verso, 2023), Vijay Prashad and Mikaela Nhondo Erskog illuminate the potential for a reinvigorated socialist politics in Africa. In turning away from Afropessimism and Decolonial Studies, the authors catalog the on-the-ground realities at play in pan-African and Marxist social movements today. | more…
In a vividly drawn account of El Maizal Commune, Chris Gilbert provides readers with a window into the inner workings of a community being refounded with an eye toward building a new “alternative communal economy.” The task, Gilbert finds, is one that is not only revolutionary, but liberating and creative, having the potential to collectively reimagine the social relations of a community. | more…
The Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari Hutchinson reflects on the relevance of his work more than fifty years after its initial publication. Even despite the promotion of wealthy Black individuals as model capitalists and COVID recovery schemes purported to help Black entrepreneurs, “Little had changed except the desperation of countless numbers of near penniless, distressed Black small business owners.” | more…
For our seventy-fifth anniversary issue, John Bellamy Foster revisits the legacy of Albert Einstein and his deep connections to Monthly Review, including his authorship of the article “Why Socialism?,” published in our first-ever issue in May 1949. Through historical documents and the famed physicist’s own words, Foster rediscovers Einstein’s commitment to socialism in both word and deed, and his collegial ties to MR‘s founding editors. | more…
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In this reprise from September 2000, Harry Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney look forward to the future of Monthly Review in the twenty-first century: “Despite mistakes, setbacks, and recognition that the road is long and arduous, we must not waver as we continue to study, educate, and be missionaries for the transcendence of the social system of capitalism and the development…of a society of equals.” | more…
This month’s Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the idea of extractivism, a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth’s resources since the mid-twentieth century, Foster notes, threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet. | more…
Matthew Sharpe discusses Aymeric Monville’s Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche (The Misery of Left Nietzscheanism), an exploration of how Nietzsche’s popularity on the left co-opts truly radical energy in favor of authoritarianism and elitism. “If Monville is right,” Sharpe concludes, “Nietzcheanism has acted as a kind of ideological ‘useful idiot.’” | more…
In a world of convergent crises, leading voices have called for radical changes to food, financial, and energy systems. However, these fail to account for a deeper systemic crisis: unfettered and accelerating of capital accumulation. In this article, M. Graziano Ceddia and Jacopo Nicola Bergamo provide a more comprehensive narrative, one which emphasizes capital as a social relation—and the potential of the environmental proletariat to dismantle its dominance. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
In this remarkable reprise reprinted from Monthly Review‘s October 1992 issue, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy look ahead to the ecological crisis that has continued to unfold into the twenty-first century. Presaging the critical juncture at which we find ourselves today, they write that “only a change in the in the nature of power structures on a global scale could bring a realistic hope for the long-term continuation of human civilization…. If you think that is true, what do you think are the implications?” | more…
Named one of “five of the best science picks” on Nature
“Cuba’s future must, by necessity, be a future of scientists,” Fidel Castro proclaimed in 1960. As Agustín Lage Dávila shows in this pathbreaking book, Cuba has in fact become a global leader in both the generation and application of scientific knowledge—as demonstrated by its ubiquitous production of socially useful products, from vaccines and medicines, to organic food. Speaking from his position as a noted Cuban immunologist, Dr. Lage shows how Cuba achieved such prominence, positing that the training of its scientists, their scientific practices, and their relationships with the Cuban people are
“It is surprising,” Marnie Holborow writes, “how often in Marxist accounts of women’s oppression Frederick Engels is overlooked.” In responding to this gap in analysis, Holborow examines his influential work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, finding his observations on gender roles and social reproduction under capitalism—and their expressions based on class—are not only astute for Engels’s time, but very much for ours as well. | more…