Archive | Monthly Review Essays

Anybody who’s ever leafed through Finnegans Wake will quickly recognize that we’re not dealing here with a standard novel, just as anybody leafing through Marx’s Capital will know we’re not dealing with standard economics.

He taught with a kind of irreverent brilliance that made you laugh, think, and question everything you thought you knew about both the economy and economics.

The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy represents a radical change from prior NSS documents. Its main thrusts are both racist and imperialist. It focuses on white ethnonationalism and anti-migration policies, its aspirations in the Western Hemisphere, capitalist economic relationships, and resource imperialism.

Almost two centuries after its opening night, Gogol’s five-act satirical play The Government Inspector continues to create a stir with every performance, seemingly no matter where. Maybe because corruption and self-serving double-talk aren’t just familiar features of 19th-century Russia, but have become ingrained facets of all systems of government and officialdom, making them recognizable to […]

1. The Revival of the Big Stick and the Monroe Doctrine Since Donald Trump’s reelection as president of the United States, the world has watched in shock as US foreign policy has grown increasingly unilateral and aggressive, raising deep concerns about the future of international politics. These concerns stem not only from the record of […]

Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2]  A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek […]

1. Introduction The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world wealth in 1948. As the only power which had used nuclear weapons on civilian […]

This year, Brazil and China celebrate fifty years of official diplomatic relations. The importance of the Sino-Brazilian relationship cannot be underestimated in the context of the rise of the Global South, the decline of U.S. hegemony, and the emergence of a New Cold War. With a look back into the history of bilateral relations, how can we understand the importance of these two countries in the current conjuncture in pushing forward changes unseen in a century?

Zhao Dingqi interviews Dave Hill about neoliberalism and the socialist movement in Britain.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a Texan farmworker infected with HPAI H5N1. He suffered the hemorrhaging in the eye the cows he tended expressed.

In this interview with Zhao Dingqi, Victor Grossman reflects on his life as an American communist in East Germany.

The independence of French Indochina after the Second World War triggered a wave of independence in the French-speaking African countries, and it appeared that French colonial foundations had suffered a huge blow in the early 1960s.

In “The Dialectics of Dependency,” Ruy Mauro Marini developed a theory of dependency and unequal exchange that is still invaluable today.

Only an ecosocialist revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arise—now!

The universal premises of culture and politics have been subject to criticism from the moment that Enlightenment theories emerged. In postmodern theory, radical skepticism replaces judgement and makes universal speculation seem like either an absurd game or a violent imposition.

The gendered forms of violence in capitalist-patriarchal societies are, obviously, related to what is habitually recognized as violence against women.

Late Imperialism and the Expropriation of the Earth.

When the concept of ecological civilization came to prominence in China, beginning around 2002 it was depicted as a defining element of socialism with Chinese characteristics, requiring a transition away from the expropriation of nature endemic to capitalist modernity and pointing to the need for worldwide social transformations. It was thus closely related from the start to the Marxist critique of capitalism.

While the rich embark on trips to space and fantasize about colonizing Mars, nearly a billion people have no access whatsoever to electricity.

War is like a volcanic eruption in that it both exposes and obscures the clash of powerful forces.