Humanity in this moment faces two major crises: one ecological, growing more acute with every planetary boundary passed; the other social, leading to deprivation and despair across the globe. An effective ecosocialist approach to these crises, Jason Hickel writes, must aim to resolve both in a single stroke. | more…
The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis tells the true tale of a mathematician who found himself taking an involuntary break from chalking equations to sit opposite a row of self-righteous anti-Communist congressmen at the height of the McCarthy era. Courageously asserting the First Amendment to confront a system rapidly descending into fascism, Davis testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He became one of a small number of left wingers who served time for contempt of Congress. | more…
The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understanding human welfare. | more…
As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth. | more…
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…
Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. “So how,” Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, “might planning beyond growth look?” It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world. | more…
Gregory Elich interviews George T. Mudimu, a Zimbabwe-based agrarian specialist, about present-day land struggles in Zimbabwe, two decades after the institution of the Fast Track Land Reform Program. | more…
Lula’s electoral victory may have reinvigorated the Brazilian left, but the destruction wrought by ultraconservative ex-president Jair Bolsonaro presents a monumental task for the new government. Rosa Marques and Paulo Nakatani review the challenges Lula has faced with an eye to those still to come. | more…
Monthly Review editors remember the life of MR editorial board member John J. Simon (1934–2022), a dedicated socialist, towering figure in radical publishing and broadcasting. | more…
Steve Ellner analyzes the debate surrounding the wave of elections of left-leaning political leaders in Latin America, known as the Pink Tide. Critics of these governments, Ellner suggests, emphasize their shortcomings at the expense of recognizing their anti-imperial position. | more…
The Half-Earth movement calls for rewilidng half the earth as a means of combating the planetary crisis. Brian Napoletano explores the implications of the Half-Earth approach as outlined Vettese and Pendergrass’s Half-Earth Socialism. | 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…