Articles by Monthly Review

We found 61 results.

Extractivism in the Anthropocene
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Apr 2024

April 2024 – The idea of extractivism is a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth’s resources since the mid-twentieth century threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet.

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Engels for Our Times: Gender, Social Reproduction, and Revolution
Marnie Holborow | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Mar 2024

March 2024 – It is surprising how often in Marxist accounts of women’s oppression Frederick Engels is overlooked. He is dismissed for being deterministic, overly economistic, even un-Marxist. Heather Brown’s key work on Karl Marx and gender sees Engels as crudely mechanical compared to Marx.

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Actual U.S. Military Spending Reached US$ 1.537 Trillion in 2022—More than Twice Acknowledged Level (US$ 765.8 billion)
Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Nov 2023

Nov 2023 – How much does it cost to maintain an empire? A stunning new analysis shows the true scale of U.S. military spending, which far outstrips conventional estimates, which use data gleaned from traditional sources.

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What Every Child Should Know about Marx’s Theory of Value
Michael A. Lebowitz | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Sep 2023

September 2023 – The law of value works in mysterious ways. For some Marxists, it underlies everything we need to know about capitalism. But, just as Karl Marx claimed he was not a Marxist, so too might he have said, “that’s not my law of value.”

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The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism
Ian Angus | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Apr 2023

The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution
Pedro Ross Leal | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Jan 2023

13 Jan 2023 – A Rare Look from Inside Cuba: In highlighting the little-known role of the Cuban working class during the Special Period, the author has produced a book essential to understanding the survival of revolutionary Cuba.

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Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Aug 2022

1 Jul 2022 – Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of the abyss. We are approaching a climate Armageddon making the earth unlivable for the human and other species. Such a catastrophe is still avoidable with a revolutionary-scale reconstitution of the systems of production, consumption, and energy usage, though the time is rapidly running out.

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“Notes on Exterminism” for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 May 2022

May 2022 – The dual exterminist tendencies: the planetary ecological crisis and the growing threat of global nuclear annihilation.

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The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financializaton of the Earth
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 May 2022

1 Apr 2022 – The rapid financialization of nature that is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale.

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The Political Economy of Systemic U.S. Militarism
James M. Cypher | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Apr 2022

The U.S. industrial-military-congressional complex is made up of the interdependent dynamics of military contractor corporations, military forces, intelligence agencies, and the civilian national security state, which take form as strategy, political-economy factors, and international affairs shift.

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Confession
Raymond Nat Turner | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Mar 2022

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”  —P. J. O’Rourke

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A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes
Chris Gilbert | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Mar 2022

1 Mar 2022 – Just as the independence struggle had different resonances in the Andes, so too does Venezuela’s project of communal socialism. The region is home to one of the most successful communes in the country and has a solid productive basis (a chocolate factory and coffee cooperative). However, the Che Guevara Commune is markedly different from others.

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Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Mar 2022

1 Mar 2022 – From Sep-Nov 2021, overlapping with the UN Climate Change Conference, three major developments in global finance marked a turning point in the financial expropriation of the earth and a shift in the economic paradigm to unlimited accumulation of total capital, which is now seen as including “natural capital.”

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Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State
István Mészáros | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Feb 2022

3 Feb 2022 – István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth.

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Red Current, Pink Tide: A Visit to El Maizal Commune in Venezuela
Chris Gilbert | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Dec 2021

1 Dec 2021 – Chris Gilbert on how Venezuela’s El Maizal Commune’s flag-waving communards are among the reddest elements in the so-called Pink Tide.

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World Development under Monopoly Capitalism
Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Nov 2021

1 Nov 2021 – Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden explain how, as the internationalization of monopoly capital grows, particularly through the domination of global value chains, so do the worldwide rate of exploitation and degree of monopoly.

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The Long Haitian Revolution
Pierre Labossiere, Margaret Prescod and Camila Valle | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Oct 2021

“When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.” —C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins

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The New Cold War on China
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Jul 2021

1 Jul 2021 – On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former […]

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Capital and the Ecology of Disease
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Jun 2021

June 2021 – The dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis is simply an external, “black swan” event, a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence that has entered from outside the system. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts.

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The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes
Laurence H. Shoup | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 May 2021

1 May 2021 – Laurence Shoup looks at the Council on Foreign Relations to analyze the new Biden administration, its personnel, and the policies it is likely to follow.

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Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change (FREE eBook!)
Michael E. Tigar | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 29 Mar 2021

In his first U.S. Supreme Court case—at the age of 28—Tigar won a unanimous victory that freed thousands of Vietnam War resisters from prison. He led the legal team against the Pinochet regime for a 1976 Washington, DC car bombing and prosecuted Pinochet for torture and genocide. Tigar has been counsel to Angela Davis, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), the Chicago Eight, and leaders of the Black Panther Party, to name only a few.

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Capital, Science, Technology
Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo Crossa Niell | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Mar 2021

1 Mar 2021 – The Development of Productive Forces in Contemporary Capitalism – How capitalism has become a parasitic entity with an essentially rentier and speculative function. Underlying this is an institutional framework that favors the private appropriation and the concentration of the products of general intellect.

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The Ideology of Late Imperialism
Prof. Zhun Xu | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Mar 2021

1 Mar 2021 – The Return of the Geopolitics of the Second International

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The Drain of Wealth: Colonialism before the First World War
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Feb 2021

1 Feb 2021 – The Western European powers appropriated economic surplus from their colonies and this aided their own industrial transition and the diffusion of capitalism to the regions of new European settlement. In the literature on economic growth, however, we find little awareness of the existence of such transfers, let alone their sheer scale. How a substantial part of India’s earnings was appropriated by Britain.

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The Contagion of Capital
John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna and Brett Clark | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Jan 2021

1 Jan 2021 – The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline.

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Between Capitalism and Community
Michael A. Lebowitz | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Jan 2021

In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences, that are central to Marx’s analysis.

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The Return of Nature and Marx’s Ecology
Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Dec 2020

1 Dec 2020 – John Bellamy Foster talks about the paths great ecosocialist thinkers traveled, the most prominent debates in Marxist ecological thought, and the urgent need to transcend the conditions that threaten our planet.

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Crisis and Predation: India, COVID-19, and Global Finance
Research Unit for Political Economy | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Dec 2020

Nov 2020 issue – With the advent of COVID-19, India’s rulers imposed the world’s most stringent
lockdown on an already depressed economy, dealing a body blow to the majority of India’s billion-plus population. Yet the Indian government’s spending to cushion the lockdown’s economic impact ranked among the world’s lowest in GDP terms, resulting in unprecedented unemployment and hardship.

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Marx, Dead and Alive: Reading “Capital” in Precarious Times
Andy Merrifield | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Nov 2020

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand.

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Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Nov 2020

John Bellamy Foster on how, two hundred years since his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times.

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Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution
Cira Gilbert and Chris Pascual Marquina | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Nov 2020

With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive emigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people do and think in these times of social emergency.

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Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19
Rob Wallace | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Oct 2020

14 Oct 2020 Issue – Dead Epidemiologists is an eclectic collection of commentaries, articles, and interviews revealing the hidden-in-plain-sight truth behind the pandemic: Global capital drove the deforestation and development that exposed us to new pathogens. Rob Wallace and his colleagues—ecologists, geographers, activists, and, yes, epidemiologists—unpack the material and conceptual origins of COVID-19.

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The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War
Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Oct 2020

In this detailed and expansive book, the authors demonstrate that widespread violence is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful.

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Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Sep 2020

Washington Bullets is about the bullets sent by various U.S. administrations to crush revolutions, assassinate democratically elected leaders—to destroy hope. Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad delivers a scathing indictment of U.S. imperialism, from the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, to the twenty-first-century ousters of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

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Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution
Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Jul 2020

Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, by Don Fitz – Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost.

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COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism
John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Jun 2020

1 Jun 2020 – Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises – COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism. We are seeing the emergence of catastrophe capitalism as the structural crisis of the system takes on planetary dimensions.

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Messianic Zionism – The Ass and the Red Heifer
Moshé Machover | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Apr 2020

1 Feb 2020 – The relation between Zionism and Judaism (the Jewish religion) is paradoxical and complex. In its early days, Zionism was apparently a thoroughly secular political movement. Apparently. In reality, while its ego was secular, its id has always been religious. And in recent times, the latter has emerged from its hidden recess and is parading in full view. A form of religious Zionism has gained influence in Israel, which shares with militant Christian evangelism and Islamic jihadism the character of political movement with fundamentalist religious ideology.

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The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Mar 2020

Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism.

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Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Dec 2019

1 Dec 2019 – It is impossible to understand the totality of capitalist relations apart from the conditions of both exploitation and expropriation, which together generate the ensemble of oppressions that characterize the system. It is here too that we begin to understand the various interlocking aspects of capitalist domination, which require a corevolutionary praxis in response.

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Capitalism & Robbery
Editorial | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Dec 2019

1 Dec 2019 – Bloomberg insists that we need to get our priorities straight: the economy comes before the earth, capitalism before nature. Yet, it is clear that we are faced with two irreversible crises: one threatening to destabilize the world capitalist economy, the other promising to destroy the planet as a home to humanity. Both represent the culmination of capitalist contradictions and point to the need to transform society. It is the coevolution of economic and ecological contradictions under global monopoly-finance capital that defines the crisis of our times.

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The Berlin Wall and General Pyrrhus
Victor Grossman | Berlin Bulletin, Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Nov 2019

9 Nov 2019 – East Germans soon learned that freedom of the press was for those who owned the presses, that freedom of speech helped most those who ruled over studios and cable connections. Most tellingly, they learned very quickly that those 100 West-marks were soon spent and new ones, for all those glistening commodities and travels, had somehow to be earned, while over 95 % of the industry they had built up was taken over by Westerners.

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The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation
Seth Donnelly | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Aug 2019

“We’re making headway on global poverty,” trills billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. “Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues,” reports the World Bank. And “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” inquires The Economist magazine. Seth Donnelly answers: “It didn’t!” In fact, according to Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, virtually nothing about these glad tidings proclaiming plummeting global poverty rates is true.

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Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music
Gerald Horne | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jun 2019

18 Jun 2019 – The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War.

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The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War
Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jun 2019

The all-pervasive occurrence of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the human world, particularly in a modern era. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful.

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Voices of Latin America: Social Movements and the New Activism
Tom Gatehouse | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Apr 2019

3 Apr 2019 – These are uncertain times in Latin America. Popular faith in democracy has been shaken; traditional political parties and institutions are stagnating, and there is a growing right-wing extremism overtaking some governments. Yet, in recent years, autonomous social movements have multiplied and thrived. This book presents voices of these movement protagonists themselves, as they describe the major issues, conflicts, and campaigns for social justice in Latin America today.

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Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Jan 2019

Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx’s ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks, Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2018

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Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power
Michael E. Tigar | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Nov 2018

The “Justice Department” appears, by its very nature and practice, to appropriate “justice” as the exclusive property of the federal government. In his brilliantly acerbic collection of essays, Tigar reveals, deconstructs, and eviscerates mythologies surrounding the U.S. criminal justice system, racism, free expression, workers’ rights, and international human rights.

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The Biofuels Deception: Going Hungry on the Green Carbon Diet
Okbazghi Yohannes | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Nov 2018

There is by now no question among informed people that the Earth is undergoing severe climate change—soon to become catastrophic, if humans don’t take drastic measures to stop it. Heroically into the fray steps the biofuel industry, announcing to millions of anxious consumers that this eco-crisis can be averted if only they turn away from fossil fuels, to the saving power of synthetic bioproducts. But, although eliminating fossil fuels is essential, the manufacture of biofuels has far more to do with sating profit-hungry corporations than with saving the Earth.

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India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History
Bernard D’Mello | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Sep 2018

India After Naxalbari is about a thread of Indian history that mainstream historians have tended to either ignore or misrepresent. This account puts it squarely into our history books. –Arundhati Roy, author, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value
Samir Amin | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Mar 2018

Unlike such obvious forms of oppression as feudalism or slavery, capitalism has been able to survive through its genius for disguising corporate profit imperatives as opportunities for individual human equality and advancement. But it was the genius of Karl Marx, in his masterwork, Capital, to discover the converse law of surplus value: behind the illusion of the democratic, supply-and-demand marketplace, lies the workplace, where people trying to earn a living are required to work way beyond the time it takes to pay their wages.

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The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Monthly Review Press – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Mar 2018

Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. This is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors.

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Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies
Edward S. Herman | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Dec 2017

Aug 2017 – It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

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Why Socialism?
Albert Einstein | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Nov 2017

Originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1, 1949) but with undeniable relevance today. – “Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.”

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The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture
Miguel Altieri and Fernando Funes-Monzote – Monthly Review, 31 Dec 2012

When Cuba faced the shock of lost trade relations with the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s, food production initially collapsed due to the loss of imported fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, parts, and petroleum. The situation was so bad that Cuba posted the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America and the Caribbean. But the island rapidly re-oriented its agriculture to depend less on imported synthetic chemical inputs, and became a world-class case of ecological agriculture.

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Why Socialism?
Albert Einstein – Monthly Review, 26 Dec 2011

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

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Why Socialism?
Albert Einstein, Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jan 2011

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

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The Paradox of Capitalism
Prabhat Patnaik – Monthly Review, 1 Nov 2010

But Keynes wrote a long time ago. He should have seen the inner working of the system better (after all Marx, who died the year Keynes was born, saw it), but perhaps his upper-class Edwardian upbringing came in the way. But what does one say of people who, having seen the destitution-“high growth” dialectics in the contemporary world, still cling to the illusion that the logic of compound interest will overcome the “economic problem of mankind”? Neo-liberal ideologues of course propound this illusion, either in its simple version, which is the “trickle down” theory, or in the slightly more complex version, where the State is supposed to ensure through its intervention that the benefits of the growing mass of goods and services are made available to all, thereby alleviating poverty and easing the struggle for subsistence.

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Media Disinformation: Washington’s “Regime-Change Hit-List” – Iran vs. Honduras (Part 1)
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson – Monthly Review, 11 Oct 2010

It would be hard to find a better test of the integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras over the past couple of years (2009-2010).

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An Account of the General Strike in Nepal
Suvrat Raju – Monthly Review, 17 May 2010

While the world media was focused on a boring battle between the Tories and their New Labour cousins in Britain, a historic struggle was underway in Nepal.

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TRANSITIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Rick Wolff – Monthly Review, 12 Jan 2010

The transition out of feudalism to capitalism in Europe, mostly from the 17th to the 19th centuries, took multiple forms.  It was uneven as well, happening in different ways at different rates in different places.  Marx studied that transition’s various dimensions because they offered valuable lessons for the different transition he was interested in: out […]

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U.S. MILITARY BASES AND EMPIRE
The Editors, Monthly Review, 9 Jan 2009

The Bases of Empire Empires throughout human history have relied on foreign military bases to enforce their rule, and in this respect at least, Pax Americana is no different than Pax Romana or Pax Britannica. “The principal method by which Rome established her political supremacy in her world,” wrote historian Arnold Toynbee in his America […]

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