Archive | Commentary

Distinguished Venezuelan history and politics professor Steve Ellner visited Caracas from September 26 to October 7 to teach an intensive seminar at the Venezuelan Planning School, titled “The Role of the Venezuelan State in the Transition to Socialism.”  Venezuelanalysis‘s Lucas Koerner sat down with the long-time Universidad de Oriente professor to discuss a range of […]

Time to vote for our next president!  Time to choose just the right person to lead our world’s most militarily advanced superpower.  That’s why presidential elections should be nonviolent and fulfilling on a deep personal level!  O whom, shall I choose?  Let’s see. . . Hillary Rodham Clinton: Democrat and fellow feminist.  Speechifies against poverty, […]

To add your signature to this open letter in solidarity, please sign at <bit.ly/2dtPmzP>. Open Letter to San Francisco State University President Leslie Wong: Uphold the MOU with An-Najah University and Support Professor Abdulhadi! Members of the Delegation with faculty and students from An-Najah University. In March 2016, nineteen of us were part of a […]

There is currently too much dramatic news abroad in the world, mostly bad.  What can an election in one single city mean, far from most fronts?  Yet the voting in Berlin last Sunday (September 18th) was full of drama and meaning, also outside Germany.  The results caused some to grieve, some to applaud, and analysts […]

In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way.  On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]

The debate about the US anthem echoes a debate about the German anthem.  The “Deutschland über alles” text goes back to 1841 but its meaning has been and still is easily misused.  When East Germany was annexed in 1990 many suggested adopting the GDR anthem, written in 1949 by the anti-Nazi poet (and minister of […]

Key conclusion of Anthropocene Working Group report to Geological Congress: the “Great Acceleration” in the second half of the 20th century marked the end of the Holocene and the beginning of a new geological epoch. The evidence is overwhelming: earth entered a new geological epoch in about 1950.  In an official report to the International […]

Darien, CT — Only days before he was to enter Yale Law School, Trey Von Der Brown, 22, was mowed down behind the wheel of his powder-blue 2016 Mini Cooper convertible in a hail of police bullets.  In the passenger seat, Wentworth MacFarquhar, 19, a second-year student at Yale Business School, was critically wounded. Rich-white-people […]

The defense of national sovereignty, like its critique, leads to serious misunderstandings once one detaches it from the social class content of the strategy in which it is embedded.  The leading social bloc in capitalist societies always conceives sovereignty as a necessary instrument for the promotion of its own interests based on both capitalist exploitation […]

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is a social movement founded in 1984.  For more information, contact Cassia Bechara at cassia@mst.org.br>.

On the night of 15-16 July, Turkey went through a cataclysm that stunned the world: a huge section of the armed forces of the country (TSK in its Turkish acronym) attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, came very close to its objective, but was ultimately defeated.  Official […]

  With the failure of the attempted coup of 15 July, the true danger begins now: an attempt to transform the de facto presidential system into overt fascism with the support of a racist and reactionary militant mass movement buoyed by the rhetoric that the “coup was thwarted by popular resistance” “#NATO partner #Erdoğan uses […]

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is a social movement founded in 1984.  For more information, contact Cassia Bechara at cassia@mst.org.br>.

A Request to Friends of Monthly Review From the time the current rightist government in Hungary came into power, the archive of Georg Lukács — a preeminent Marxist of the 20th century — has been under a brutal attack.  It has been gradually deprived of its subvention from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of […]

Joan Acker, who died on June 22, 2016, was one of the foremost socialist feminists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Her work about gender and class drew much of its creativity from a continual though uneasy engagement between feminism and Marxism.  She was one of the initial subscribers to Monthly Review, beginning […]

Dear Hillary Rodham Clinton, I am voting for you to be our first woman president because Sisterhood is Powerful, and who doesn’t love power?  For a woman to be accepted as “one of the boys,” she has to be twice as good at the things boys like.  War, for instance.  That’s you, Sister! As Senator, […]

  On May 31, Valdir Misnerovicz, an important and effective organizer of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, was arrested while teaching a class on agricultural coops in Veranópolis, a city in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.  The arrest did not stem from his lectures, but from his activism.  To organize […]

Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often.  It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore?  How come he died, and what’s the reason for?”  Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to […]

In a cabinet meeting in October 2012, months before his death, Hugo Chávez declared that the Bolivarian process needed to make a radical change of course, literally calling for a “golpe de timón” or “strike at the helm.”  From that moment forward the slogan “golpe de timón” began to circulate in the most varied contexts […]

Plutocracy the Wonderful O beautiful, our properties Our lands and woods and grains Our fields and mines and factories Our ships and trains and planes! Accumulate, accumulate!  We never get enough Of profits, income, capital, and other lovely stuff. O beautiful, our trophy wives Their diamonds, furs, and shoes Our speedboats, cars, jets, limousines Our […]