The Reserve Bank of India, as is to be expected, has been denying that its governor Raghuram Rajan had ever suggested that the world was facing the possibility of a 1930s-type Great Depression. Members of the “global financial community” are not supposed to say such things; so even if Dr Rajan did, a denial was […]
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
Lessons from a defeat in Europe
The Troika are celebrating the end of negotiations with Greece, proclaiming that thanks to their tireless efforts the Eurozone remains whole. And why wouldn’t they celebrate? They have demonstrated their power to crush, at least for now, the Greek effort to end austerity and its associated devastating social consequences. Tragically, Syriza has not only surrendered, […]
The Book Is a Weapon
The theme of the following talk, delivered at the Filven, Venezuela’s International Book Fair, in Caracas on 8 November 2008, is central to The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, published by Monthly Review Press this month, available soon in bookstores. The theme of this book fair, “the book in the construction of Bolivarian socialism,” […]
Criminal Interest
Debt wedged sharply on the shoulders, necks, heads and bodies of state. A debt to others, burrowed deep, deeper, deeply into caves of criminal interest. Debt composed of mounds of soft bills, notes, and hard-edged instruments of finance, a percussion beating, in a nation’s ears. Clanging sounds of resistance, echoes of agony […]
Glory to the Lucid Courage of the Greek People, Facing the European Crisis
The Greek People are an example to Europe and the world. With courage and lucidity the Greek people have rejected the ignoble diktat of European and international finance. They have won a first victory by affirming that democracy cannot exist unless it knows how to put itself at the service of social progress. They have […]
ΟΧΙ!
For some in other lands and continents Greece may seem distant and marginal, a few narrow peninsulas and scattered archipelagos jutting out of the sea. Some may vaguely recall school knowledge about it. “Didn’t some fellow named Prometheus steal fire from the gods? Or was it Alexander the Great untying some “Gordian knot”? Or a […]
“Universal Health Care” in Free Market Paradise
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Below is the editorial in its June 2015 issue. — Ed. The essence of “free market” ideology is exposed clearly when the health of the human body is at issue. When outcomes are determined on the basis of […]
Charleston Massacre
He had grown bloated on the red hot empty calories of right wing race hatred. He carried his gun hidden in his pants like sex power into a church to murder. What safer place to slaughter? On city streets someone else might be carrying, but church was guaranteed to let him kill without danger to […]
The Idea of India
When the ‘fascist’ Narendra Modi was coming close to becoming India’s Prime Minister, intellectuals told us that he would be a threat to the very idea of an inclusive and democratic India. Amartya Sen declared that he cannot be part of an India which has Modi as its PM. Modi is now PM, but nowhere […]
A Doctor’s Degree at 102
102-year-old Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport receives diploma 77-years after Nazis denied it http://t.co/KBB4iyTPfo — Ruptly (@Ruptly) June 9, 2015 The frail, white-haired little lady stepping slowly up onto the stage of the Babylon cinema theater in Berlin — to giant applause — was not wearing a collegiate cap and gown. But she had undoubtedly made academic history. […]
Unending Hard Times: Whose Is the Toil and Whose Is the Wealth?
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney. The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012; Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 2013. pp x + 227. Rs 150. The secular decline of decadal average annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of the […]
Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism
Introduction by Richard Fidler Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press. The featured speaker […]
Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China
China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique. Marx explicitly defined […]
Changing Captains on the Left
Wealthy, powerful heads of state and other bosses high up in the Bavarian Alps, and the vigorous protests from opposing crowds kept out of earshot downhill, largely stole media thunder this past weekend. Far lower in altitude and attention, with almost no thunder from the media or otherwise, another meeting was held in less scenic […]
The Declining World Foreign Exchange Reserves
If one adds up the foreign exchange reserves of all the countries in the world, including under the term “reserves” what these countries hold in the form of gold, US dollars, other reserve currencies, Special Drawing Rights of the IMF, and also liquid assets such as short-term Treasury Bills of the US government, then the […]
Mészáros and the Emancipatory Transition: Beyond Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Part One In his work Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014), Thomas Piketty contributes much to understanding the inequalities of income, inheritance, capital, and wealth generated by the capital system. We are not likely to disagree with many of his insights based on his study of capital and wealth distribution. Among these […]
It’s Capitalism, Stupid!
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today’s politics that is content to treat […]
Kashmir — Hell of Internal Colonialism
When it comes to Kashmir, official mendacity in India seems to cross all bounds. So even a prominent member of the Indian Establishment felt that the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s recent (May 22) open advocacy of “kaante-se-kaanta-nikaalte-hein” (a-thorn-to-remove-a-thorn) counterinsurgency tactics was “terrible” and that he should withdraw his out-of-line statement forthwith. “You have to neutralise […]
Richard Levins and Dialectical Thinking
For Richard Levins’s 85th birthday and his career as a scientist for the people. Richard Levins conveys the essence of dialectical thinking through the many examples he offers of its application, in every imaginable domain. Someone earlier than Dick — perhaps it was Hegel — remarked that, in contrast to formal logic, which is static, […]
Hijacking the Anthropocene
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass What can lobbyists do when science contradicts their political messages? Some simply deny the science, as many conservatives do with climate […]
