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  • Monthly Review Essays
  • Lax Oversight Allows Serious Health and Safety Violations to Continue at Immigration Detention

    Hunted and banned

    Originally published: Boston Review on March 25, 2026 by Robyn Maynard (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Apr 14, 2026)

    Efforts to control Black mobility—from early passports to the Fugitive Slave Act—laid much of the groundwork for today’s border regimes.

  • A protest in Washington, D.C. on October 14. Image: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

    The Free Speech exception

    Originally published: Boston Review on October 30, 2023 by Radhika Sainath (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Nov 07, 2023)

    Support for Palestinian rights is facing a McCarthyite backlash.

  • Barbara Ehrenreich 2 by David Shankbone

    My revolutionary inspiration, Barbara Ehrenreich

    Originally published: Boston Review on September 15, 2022 by Lynne Segal (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Sep 17, 2022)

    Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.

  • Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, speaks at a Facebook event for marketing professionals in 2012. Image: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

    How capitalism—not a few bad actors—destroyed the Internet

    Originally published: Boston Review on August 3, 2022 by Matthew Crain (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Aug 24, 2022)

    Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

  • Amazon Labor Union (ALU) members celebrate after the voting results to unionize Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y. on Friday, April 1, 2022. Image: AP

    Labor’s militant minority

    Originally published: Boston Review on June 15, 2022 by Mie Inouye (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jun 22, 2022)

    How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.

  • Payton Croskey Kenia Hale

    How a new generation is combatting digital surveillance

    Originally published: Boston Review on June 2, 2022 by Nate File (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jun 07, 2022)

    Younger voices are using technology to respond to the needs of marginalized communities and nurture Black healing and liberation.

  • Clockwise from left: William Dawson, Marian Anderson, William Grant Still, Florence Price. Background features the score of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

    Classical music and the color line

    Originally published: Boston Review on December 15, 2021 by Douglas Shadle (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jan 09, 2022)

    The field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion, despite its universalist claims.

  • Frederick Douglass and the Haiti Commission on USS Tennessee in Key West. Image: Florida Keys Public Libraries

    Frederick Douglass and American Empire in Haiti

    Originally published: Boston Review on December 9, 2021 by Peter James Hudson (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Dec 23, 2021)

    Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. The disastrous episode reveals much about the country’s long struggle for Black sovereignty while always under the threat of U.S. empire.

  • mage: Open Grid Scheduler

    Who owns our data?

    Originally published: Boston Review on October 25, 2021 by Aziz Z. Huq (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Oct 27, 2021)

    We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.

  • Debt campaigners protest the impact of "vulture funds" on Argentina outside the office of Elliott Advisors, owners of NML Capital, in New York in February 2013.

    How emerging markets hurt poor countries

    Originally published: Boston Review on October 13, 2021 (more by Boston Review)  |

    Financial globalization was supposed to spur development. Instead, it transfers money to the global North and exacerbates existing inequalities.

  • Still from The Rifleman, courtesy of Sierra Pettengill and Field of Vision

    How the modern NRA was born at the border

    Originally published: Boston Review on May 7, 2021 by Sierra Pettengill and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted May 14, 2021)

    Watch our release of documentary short The Rifleman, which examines how NRA head Harlon Carter fused gun rights, immigration enforcement, and white supremacy. Then read an interview with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

  • Clockwise from top left: Charles Ogletree, Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Kimberlé Crenshaw.

    The War on Critical Race theory

    Originally published: Boston Review on May 7, 2021 by David Goldberg (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted May 13, 2021)

    Turning a blind eye to the realities of racial injustice, the highly orchestrated right-wing attacks cast a body of scholarship about race in the law as a great threat to American society.

  • Image: Wikimedia

    Why Cornel West’s tenure fight matters

    Originally published: Boston Review on March 3, 2021 by Robin D. G. Kelley, PhD (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Mar 08, 2021)

    I wrote letters for West’s hire and renewal at Harvard. The school’s administrators completely miss the point of tenure. – ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

  • Right image: USCGC Harriet Lane transporting Haitian asylum seekers in 1991. USCG photo.

    Immigration enforcement and the afterlife of the slave ship

    Originally published: Boston Review on February 11, 2021 by Ryan Fontanilla (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Feb 16, 2021)

    Coast Guard techniques for blocking Haitian asylum seekers have their roots in the slave trade. Understanding these connections can help us disentangle immigration policy from white nationalism.

  • Jim Crow Caste Wilkerson

    Caste does not explain race

    Originally published: Boston Review on December 15, 2020 by Charisse Burden-Stelly (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Dec 22, 2020)

    The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

  • The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

    The long shadow of racial fascism

    Originally published: Boston Review on October 28, 2020 (more by Boston Review)  |

    Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

  • 5 Media (Photo: Françoise Foliot )

    Colonizing the future

    Originally published: Boston Review on September 28, 2020 by Devin Donovan (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Oct 13, 2020)

    Working people are forever kept on the brink of going broke. More than higher wages and better job security, a just economy requires giving them the power to choose and create their own futures.

  • Where Do We Go From Here: A Fundraiser for Black Lives

    Where do we go from here: A fundraiser for Black Lives

    Originally published: Boston Review on July 14, 2020 (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jul 27, 2020)

    A recording of our panel discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement. Featuring Elizabeth Hinton, Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Brandon M. Terry, and Cornel West.

  • Image: WCN 24/7

    Reform won’t end police sexual violence

    Originally published: Boston Review on July 20, 2020 by Anne Gray Fischer (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jul 22, 2020)

    The legal right to sexual violence is part and parcel of policing. This will not end until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies.

  • Image: Flickr

    How the law killed Ahmaud Arbery

    Originally published: Boston Review on July 7, 2020 by Joseph Margulies (more by Boston Review)  | (Posted Jul 08, 2020)

    In many states, legal regimes sanction the predictable murder of innocent black men. Justice will not be served until the law changes.

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Monthly Review Essays

  • Parallel Universes
    Andy Merrifield

    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.

Lost & Found

  • Honor the Vietnamese, Not Those Who Killed Them
    Michael D. Yates A Vietnamese stamp depicting two Vietnamese resistance fighters shooting down a US Army helicopter.

    Only the courage of those who opposed the war, including the soldiers who did so at great risk, should be respected.

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