Archive | December, 2016

Monthly Review is in the midst of a transition, in which we are upgrading our online and social media platforms. While MRzine will cease to exist in its current form, we will be archiving all articles published in MRzine from its inception in 2005.

Today MRZine comes to an end, after over a decade’s run.  Thank you for your past support. Needless to say, Monthly Review itself will endure hasta siempre, its presence online steadily expanding, including on Facebook and Twitter. My next project is to establish Movement Translation Service (MTS), inspired by People’s Translation Service and similar efforts […]

Since 2011, the torrent of ill-informed, inaccurate and often entirely dishonest analysis of events in Syria has been unremitting. I have written previously about the dangers of using simplistic explanations to make sense of the conflict, a problem that has surfaced repeatedly over the past five years. However, there is a greater problem at large.

You always understood that politics was not the art of the possible—a conservative vision of politics—but rather the art of making the impossible possible, not through voluntarist actions but by understanding that politics is the art of building a social, political, and military correlation of forces that allows us to transform the existing conditions of struggle and make possible in the future what seems impossible in the present.

The term “infrastructure” covers all sorts of things, from ports to roads to canals to bridges to building railway lines. Because it covers such a range of things, many of which appear to be useful, most people look upon “infrastructure” development as an indubitably desirable thing under all circumstances. Questions are scarcely asked about its worthwhileness when the government allocates larger resources for the “infrastructure” sector, or when it instructs public sector banks to give larger loans for “infrastructure” development.

This dream.  Something is in the house, something’s breaking, the things I love are going away.  I reach for Laura, she becomes translucent, evaporates.  I wake up, telling myself this dream means I’m worried about how tired and worn Laura has grown from years of activist work trying to get people out of prison.  I’ve […]