Subjects Archives: Marxism

Many reading the Wall Street Journal on May 13, 2005, must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief, looked back and then rubbed them again. A front page story headlined “As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls” informed the largely business readership of that paper that the old Benjamin Franklin-Horatio Alger myth of […]

Who is the most cited and discussed economist in the world? Don’t waste time looking among Nobel Prize winners and other stars of the mainstream media. André Gunder Frank is by far the most cited and most discussed, as shown by a number of studies on the subject and by the more than 30,000 entries he has on the Internet

I met André Gunder Frank and his wife Marta Fuentes in 1967. Our long conversation convinced us that we were intellectually on the same wavelength. “Modernization Theory,” then dominant, ascribed the “underdevelopment” of the Third World to the retarded and incomplete formation of its capitalist institutions. Marxist orthodoxy, as represented by the Communist Parties, presented its own version of this view and characterized Latin America as “semi-feudal.” Frank put forward a new and entirely different thesis: that from its very origins Latin America had been constructed within the framework of capitalist development as the periphery of the newly arising centers of Europe’s Atlantic seabord. For my part, I had undertaken to analyze the integration of Asia and Africa into the capitalist system in light of the requirements of “accumulation on a global scale,” a process that by its inner logic had to produce a polarization of wealth and power

We have over the last four years periodically brought to your attention documents from the leadership of the revolutionary struggle in Nepal, together with our comments attempting to summarize the context. The first such document and commentary was posted in June 2001 https://monthlyreview.org/0601letter.htm, on the occasion of the massacre of King Birendra and his family in the Narayanhiti palace in Kathmandu. It was followed in January 2002 https://monthlyreview.org/0102bhattarai.htm with a discussion of the resumption of civil war that followed once the new King Gyanendra had established his personal control over the army. The growing success of the revolutionary forces, soon to bring the royal government to the negotiating table with a new truce early in 2003, was marked by a February 2003 https://monthlyreview.org/0203parvati.htm document on the role of women leadership in the struggle. The breakdown of the truce, caused by a massacre of unarmed political workers by the U.S. “advised” Royal Nepalese Army (“RNA”) on August 19, 2003, was analyzed in September 2003 https://monthlyreview.org/0903bhattarai.htm

William H. Hinton died in the early morning of Saturday, 15th of May. 2004. He was born in Chicago in 1919. At the age of 17 he worked his way to the Far East. Without money, he supported himself by washing dishes, and then got a job for six months as a reporter on an English language newspaper in Japan. He continued his travels by way of Japanese occupied Korea and Northeast China, then through the USSR to Poland and Germany, and finally returned to the United States by working as a deckhand on an American freighter

Radicals of every stripe believe that capitalist economies are incompatible with human liberation. That is, while human beings have enormous capacities to think and to do, capitalism prevents the vast majority of people from developing these capacities. Therefore if we want a society in which the full flowering of human competencies can become a reality, we will have to bring capitalism to an end and replace it with something radically different

While we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, we should as well be commemorating another event. On the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, the life of one of the 20th century’s most brilliant individuals came to an end. W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, Pan Africanist, political leader, champion of the struggle against white supremacy in the United States, died in Ghana, August 27, 1963

In this space we have had occasion to provide some, we trust, interesting and important documents from the revolutionary forces in Nepal. The most recent was the letter we received on September 5th, 2002 from Dr. Baburam Bhattarai (https://monthlyreview.org/0902bhattarai.htm). In the intervening four months events have moved at a fast pace