Archive | Monthly Review Essays

What would Losurdo and Badiou say about each other’s views on Mao? Losurdo would likely consider Badiou to be infected with Western Marxist abstractions and anarchism in his celebration of mass rebellion and disregard for the needs of realism. By contrast, Badiou would no doubt consider Losurdo to be a Stalinist cop, with his defense of order, normalcy, and the bureaucratic party-state.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years.

I have two favorite sayings. One draws on the dialogue in Shakespeare’s Henry the VI part 2 when Jack Cade envisions that the effect of his plot will be that “all the realm shall be in common.” To this, comrade Dick responds, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

This article deals with U.S. imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that U.S. imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years.

December 2013 marked the beginning of the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Ebola, a severe hemorrhagic virus which causes muscle and joint pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding, spread from Guinean forests to the capitals of Liberia and Sierra Leone by the summer of 2014.

At the recent conference of the Society for the Social Study of Science, I came to the conclusion that the history of Marxism in relation to science and technology studies is an increasingly forgotten story.

The landslide victory of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in the Indian state of Kerala in April 2021 is a historic achievement.

Re-reading Guy Endore’s “forgotten masterpiece” it is striking how this novel from 1934, long-noted for its shocking and sophisticated account of slavery and resistance in the lead-up to the Haitian Revolution, is also a penetrating account of the ethical and political deformity and alienation perpetuated by the ideology of “whiteness.”

July is mid–winter in the Southern Hemisphere, where Billie Holiday singing “like a summer with a thousand Julys” rings somewhat oddly. Just the same, there was plenty of fire to keep people warm this winter.

Since 2000, Monthly Review has focused on the current world situation, pursuing the all-round development of Marxist studies. In this way, it has helped create a significant new trend within the U.S. left, especially in Marxist political science.

The conception of the present as history crystallized into an important principle of the intellectual tradition of Monthly Review magazine. Viewing the present as history entails combining what is new with a grasp of the longer process that is vital to a deeper understanding of the present. This Introduction provides an initiation to the intellectual tradition of Monthly Review, from which we have selected the essays and the interview that appear in The Present as History 2021.

Socialist revolution throughout the world, looking to the horizon of the communist utopia, will have to collide with worldwide capitalism for that phenomenon to be overcome definitively. Socialist revolution surely will be breaking the imperialists’ chain at its weakest link, as Lenin would have said.

The current complex of COVID-induced crises fits hand-in-glove with the system’s “normal” operation. Stability has been the delusional realm of a small sliver of the Global North, awash in post-World War Two imperialism and the repeated reinvention (and re-imposition) of various plantation systems of cheap and racialized labor.

By centering “human capital” and providing more pathways to work and residency for higher-skilled migrants, despite lower-skilled migrant workers having a far greater desire to temporarily migrate and permanently settle, Canada is able to continually reap the benefits of both high-skilled and low-skilled labor without having to socially reproduce either.

COVID-19 and other zoonotic outbreaks such as Ebola are illustrative of the complex interactions between deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, and human health and safety.

Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. His dream of an Indigenous confederacy largely died with him. Yet his appreciation of the moment and the possibilities for transformation lived on and should give us all pause.

Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Meltdowns of capitalism usually come as little surprise to savvy Marxist theorists but economic crises are one thing; economic crisis plus a global pandemic is something else again, beyond an everyday capitalist norm, more akin to the political-economy of wartime. Pandemic, like war, threatens not only life and limb, but also solidarity and tender acts of human togetherness.

Myth, an early and enduring human technology, will always be with us, in both unconscious and conscious forms. As we now face the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the call for new myths is not so much an escapist alternative to concrete analysis and action as a starting point.

At least 28 people died in the wave of social unrest that rocked the United States from late May until late July in 2020. In this 10-week period, there were 574 riots; 624 arsons; 2,382 incidents of looting; 97 police vehicles set on fire; and 16,241 people arrested for protest-related activities.

COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. Our present urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing.