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 […]
Archive | News
News updates or analysis.
National Anthems in Germany
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 […]
The Significance of the Protest Encampment in Puerto Rico
The Protest Encampment at the entrance of the Federal Courthouse in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico against the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (cynically called “PROMESA”), as well as the Wall Street Junta that said law imposes, constitutes an important act of popular resistance. In addition to the dictatorial Wall Street Junta, PROMESA […]
Expert Panel: The Anthropocene Epoch Has Definitely Begun
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 […]
Police Shoot Another Rich White Man
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 […]
Brexit and the EU Implosion: National Sovereignty — For What Purpose?
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 […]
The Truth About the Coup in Brazil
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>.
Turkey: A War of Two Coups
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 […]
Now Is No Time to Wait
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 […]
For the Right of Information and Real Democracy in Zambia
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>.
Help Save the Lukács Archive!
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, Socialist Feminist
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 […]
Hillary and My Vaginal Vote: Best Identity Politics Ever!
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, […]
Coup Acts to Repress Brazil Landless Movement
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 […]
Who Is to Blame?
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 […]
Strike at the Helm? Clamors from a Makeshift Raft
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 […]
Three Songs of the Crème de la Crème
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 […]
The Cuban People Will Overcome
Remarks by the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, during the closing of the 7th Party Congress It constitutes, compañeros, a superhuman effort to lead any people in times of crisis. Without them, the changes would be impossible. In a meeting such as this, which brings together more than a thousand representatives chosen […]
The only force that can combat imperialism today is a worldwide struggle of workers
Marxism as a philosophy of praxis is inescapable, since it sums up the revolutionary potential for human emancipation and sustainable human development.
We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of “Sumud”
At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016. Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors. We […]
