October 2017 (Volume 69, Number 5)
Notes from the Editors
The groups fighting white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere represent a cross-section of the U.S. left, from socialists to communists to anarchists. Together, they affirm that to combat the new right-wing resurgence, it is necessary to combat capitalism itself.… | more…
Venezuela’s Fragile Revolution
From Chávez to Maduro
The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has always been shaped by the dangers and demands of achieving socialism through democratic means. Only by reckoning with that complexity can we understand both Venezuela’s current crisis and its recent history.… | more…
Walter Benjamin in Venezuela
Benjamin’s philosophy presents problems best addressed not academically, but in dialogue with living political processes. And it is in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, that Benjamin’s ideas have been most vividly illustrated and interrogated.… | more…
Subsistence Under Siege
Women's Labor and Resistance in Eastern India
Neoliberal development has opened the eastern Indian state of Odisha to mining companies and steel conglomerates, threatening the region’s ancient subsistence economies and provoking a fierce resistance, in which women have taken a leading role.… | more…
The Clock Slows Down
Despite its inherent hazard of excess capacity, capitalism is distinguished by the vast, long-run expansion of its productive forces. How come? To answer this, we need to move from theory to history.… | more…
Stronger Together?
At their best, worker cooperatives are among the most effective examples of radical democracy in action. A recent vogue for cooperatives as high-tech entrepreneurial endeavors, however, seeks to expand rather than challenge the rule of market economics.… | more…
September 2017 (Volume 69, Number 4)
The publication last month of The Age of Monopoly Capital: The Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964, edited by Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, constitutes a landmark for Monthly Review Press. A historical document in itself, The Age of Monopoly Capital is not simply about the writing of their magnum opus, but also provides a window onto an entire era of American life.… | more…
The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society
The idea of total liberation from work, in its one-sidedness and incompleteness, is ultimately incompatible with a genuinely sustainable society. The real promise of a system of labor beyond capitalism rests not so much on its expansion of leisure time, but rather on its capacity to generate a new world of creative and collective work, controlled by the associated producers.… | more…
The Russians Are Coming, Again
The present Russia panic follows an entire century of fearmongering and “threat inflation,” dating to the Russian Revolution, that has long served the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex and security state. It has had little to do with either Russian or American realities, which have been consistently distorted.… | more…
‘Africa Rising’ in Retreat
New Signs of Resistance
The neoliberal export-oriented strategy has done enormous damage to Africa’s human development, gender equity, and natural environment. Reversing this project is the major challenge for Africans who resist injustice, through which they can build solidarity with the rest of the world’s oppressed peoples.… | more…
The Struggle for Shelter
Class Conflict and Public Housing in Britain
Class conflict, from both below and above, has long shaped the history of housing in Britain. These struggles continue today, as the ravages of neoliberalism have forced public housing once again onto the agenda in the United Kingdom.… | more…