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Monthly Review Volume 69, Number 3 (July-August 2017)

July-August 2017 (Volume 69, Number 3)

For this special issue, MR has invited some of the most profound left thinkers in the world to reflect on the legacy of revolutions and counterrevolutions around the world since 1917. Naturally, these authors do not all offer similar perspectives or come to the same conclusions. Nor should they—the historical issues are too complex and the human stakes are too high.… | more…

New this week!
Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

If counterrevolution ultimately triumphed over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey of the whole history of imperialist geopolitics over the last century.… | more…

New this week!
Children of the poor celebrate the first anniversary of the October revolution

The October Revolution and the Survival of Capitalism

The October Revolution was the first such event in human history that was theoretically conceived and executed according to a plan. It is this theoretical comprehension of the underlying historical conjuncture that explains the revolution’s sweep and energy, the profound changes it wrought in the world, and the extent to which it threatened the very existence of capitalism.… | more…

Uritskii’s funeral

One Hundred Years, One Hundred Messages

This article will be made available online on July 10.

The fundamental humanist values of the Russian Revolution still capture the imagination. As an experience of history and a methodology for transforming the world into a community, the revolution’s legacy has persisted far beyond the failed experiment of state socialism itself.… | more…

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Petrograders examine campaign posters for elections to the Constituent Assembly

The Great Struggle to Escape Capitalism

This article will be made available online on July 17.

Post-revolutionary societies, in their efforts to combat counterrevolution, have always been confronted with their own contradictions, and with the persistent threat that an exploiting class could reemerge. Instead of the intended socialization and democratization, in many places what resulted was instead state ownership and stultifying bureaucratization of both the economy and the polity.… | more…

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Demonstrators supporting the Constituent Assembly on Palace Square

As the World Turned Upside Down

Left Intellectuals in Yugoslavia, 1988–90

This article will be made available online on July 24.

Throughout Eastern Europe, there was an unleashing of pent-up questions, hopes, and fears brewing for decades. There was a sense that the ground was trembling underneath these experiments in socialism. It was clear to most of us that socialism could only survive through radical democratization.… | more…

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Postcard depicting heroes of the October revolution in Petrograd

The Western Left and the Russian Revolution

This article will be made available online on July 31.

For a century, the counterrevolutionary reaction to the events of October 1917 has arguably been the most determining ideological factor in Western politics. Today the victory of that counterrevolution is complete, but Western powers still need their inherited antithesis, in changing form, as self-justification.… | more…

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Presidium of the Second Northern Oblast Congress of Soviets

Bertrand Russell and the Socialism That Wasn’t

This article will be made available online on August 7.

Russell was both a liberal and a socialist, a combination perfectly comprehensible in his time, but almost unthinkable today. As a liberal, he opposed concentrations of power in all its military, governmental, and religious manifestations. But as a socialist, he equally opposed the concentrations of power stemming from the private ownership of the means of production, which therefore had to be put under social control.… | more…

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The Soviet delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk. Lev Trotsky is in the center surrounded by German officers

Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies

The New York Times, 1917–2017

This article will be made available online on August 14.

Mainstream media outlets have recently expressed their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news,” taking it as an obvious truth that what they themselves provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of false or misleading information, often supplied by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.… | more…

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A detachment of worker Red Guards poses for a photograph before departing for the front. Photograph by Ia. Shteinberg

Revolution from North to South

This article will be made available online on August 21.

The liberation struggles of peoples in the global South have been and still are closely linked with the challenge to capitalism. Indeed, the conflicts between capitalism and socialism and between North and South are inseparable. No socialism is imaginable outside of universalism, which implies the equality of peoples.… | more…

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June 2017 (Volume 69, Number 2)

June 2017 (Volume 69, Number 2)

In the last several years, the left has experienced a series of defeats, and the grip of capital has tightened. The recent reversals in Latin America are a warning. We live in an age where a new era of revolutionary social change, unlike any that came before it, is the only hope—not just for ourselves, but for the chain of human generations.… | more…

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