Archive | Commentary

‘Climate change has already caused mass death on a pandemic-like scale’

As the annual marches commemorating William of Orange’s ascension to power draw to a close, Mark Hackett reflects on how the events of 1688 shaped the modern bourgeoise state.

The latest Tricontinental dossier explores the possibilities that the current crisis of global capitalism creates for sovereign regional development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean and the importance of South-South alliances in this struggle.

Socialist author and activist Helena Sheehan opened the 2024 Red Flag Festival with readings from her books and reflections on her life in the Labour movement that has spanned more than seven decades.

A brilliant theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was also a socialist. John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

Sam Falcone pays tribute to the great life of Martin Stolar. We at Monthly Review appreciated and loved him, and mourn his death.

One can hate or admire any of the gentlemen now involved [in the push for peace in Ukraine]; I would endorse Satan himself if he could help end this God-awful war and move towards the urgently-needed peace in the area—and elsewhere.

Andy Merrifield went to Sardinia searching for Gramsci’s phantom. We can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the axe. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again.

The DRC’s vast mineral wealth contrasts with its extreme poverty, caused by exploitation and conflict. The dossier emphasises sovereignty and dignity, echoing Congolese activists’ visions for freedom.

As there can only be one price standard in any functioning economic system the transition from one price standard to another cannot take place gradually, or in a mixed way, but must take place sharply, and therefore completely in a very short time frame.

Far from water-logged Bavaria, immensely worse destruction is bloodily wrecking two million lives, and with Germany, though so distant, deeply involved. Of course I mean Palestine, especially Gaza. For decades the media has distorted or ignored what has been happening there. After October 7th ignoring it was no longer possible, here or anywhere.

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, based in Berlin, recently issued a bulletin entitled, “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies.” This was intriguing because Rosa was one of Lenin’s sternest critics, and during the Cold War era, her works found print in the United States as vindication of current U.S. policies against the Soviet Union.

This dossier looks at how the U.S.-led New Cold War against China is destabilizing Northeast Asia, focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan Strait, and Japan.

As a former college teacher, one who witnessed the attacks on those who protested against the War in Vietnam and who studied the repression on campuses during the McCarthy period, I became so appalled at what was being done to our brave and courageous college students that I began to write letters to the leaders of what are, in reality, academic enterprises.

Superficially in the recent period the U.S. has attempted to display two apparently contradictory sides of its policy to China.

It was May 10^th in Germany’s terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire.… No books were burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too alarming!

John Green on the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the Administration’s suspension of students engaged in peaceful protest and their arrest by the New York City Police Department.

Despite the fact that China’s economy continues to far outgrow all major Western economies the Western media is energetically promoting a myth that China’s economy either has or is about to drastically slow down.