November 1, 2024
Christian Noakes invites readers into a literary exploration of Franz Kafka’s short story, “Josephine the Singer.” After all, as the author notes, “Kafka’s often nightmarish stories reflect many of the social, political, and cultural dynamics inherent under capitalism.” In applying this notion to “Josephine the Singer,” Noakes discovers a tale that describes not only the mechanisms of domination that constrain us, but the possibilities of a new consciousness, and a new world.
November 1, 2024
In this deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence, Pietro Daniel Omodeo employs the frameworks laid out in Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master to weave a sociological history of AI that begins with the class struggles of the Industrial Revolution and continues into the context of early twentieth-century computing, which eventually gave rise our current Information Age. “AI,” he concludes, “sheds light onto the intellectual component of labor in all ages.”
November 1, 2024
In August 2020, ecosocialist thinker, MR author, and jazz musician Paul Burkett wrote to MR editor John Bellamy Foster about the latter’s recent book, The Return of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020). Burkett’s short correspondence revealed his deep understanding of the throughline tying the ecologically inspired thought of Marx and Engels to the later innovations of Roy Bhaskar, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and others, all the way up to Foster’s own work demonstrating that these developments are not isolated, but part of an evolving ecosocialist tradition.
October 1, 2024
It is undeniable that the rapidly worsening ecological crisis is threatening not only future generations, but the youth of today. Why, then, is the U.S. educational system failing to teach students the reality of this human-caused catastrophe? “Even science itself,” MR editors write, “is to be sacrificed on the altar of capital.”
September 1, 2024
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” recounts the history of U.S. preparations for “prolonged and limited” nuclear war and Washington’s repeated refusal to abide by international agreements regarding nuclear weaponry. With the recent announcement that the United States will be stationing nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles on German soil—within minutes’ striking distance of Moscow—this history is now, troublingly, more relevant than ever.
September 1, 2024
In an interview with Brazilian magazine Margem Esquerda, John Bellamy Foster shares with Fabio Querido, Maria Orlanda Pinassi, and Michael Löwy the formative experiences that contributed to his work as a young activist and, later, a preeminent scholar of ecological Marxism. The interview concludes with a message to the ecological left in Brazil and elsewhere: “Whatever solutions there are to the present planetary crisis must, in historical-materialist terms, arise from concrete social formations, on the basis of which the new revolutionary transformations will take place.”
June 1, 2024
In this month’s “Notes from the Editors,” MR editors confront the Tower of Babel that has emerged over Marx’s early “Prometheanism” and later “degrowth communism.” This ahistorical interpretation has engendered further critique of ecosocialism and degrowth on the part of self-identified productivist writers, who attempt incorrectly to paint degrowth as a Malthusian project, rather than a realistic effort to live within Earth’s planetary capacities.
June 1, 2024
Originally published in the German journal Widerspruch, Arman Spéth interviews John Bellamy Foster about the growing interest in degrowth thought and the importance of incorporating democratic planning aimed at true equality into all levels of society. And what of the ecosocialist revolution? “Opportunities,” Foster says, “are everywhere. Obstacles, largely a product of the present system, are also everywhere.… Nothing can or will remain the same. That is the very definition of a revolutionary situation.”
June 1, 2024
Brian M. Napoletano considers the implications of recent work by Kohei Saito, in which Saito argues that Marx’s thought progressed from early productivism to middle-stage ecosocialism, and finally to degrowth communism. Napoletano concludes, that in arguing for an artificially contrived “epistemological break” between Marx’s supposed early growth-oriented perspective and his later purported “degrowth communism,” Saito fails to recognize Marx’s actual consistent emphasis throughout his work on a dialectically conceived process of sustainable human development, requiring a true social and ecological revolution.
May 1, 2024
In this reprise from September 2000, Harry Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney look forward to the future of Monthly Review in the twenty-first century: “Despite mistakes, setbacks, and recognition that the road is long and arduous, we must not waver as we continue to study, educate, and be missionaries for the transcendence of the social system of capitalism and the development…of a society of equals.”
