Monthly Review Archives

Notes from the Editors, September 2018

2018-09-24T00:21:30-04:00

Founded in the late 1960s and recently revived, the radical organization Science for the People did—and does—far more than just publish a magazine. Chapters are forming around the country, including physicists, engineers, and biologists, as well as representatives of other scientific groupings and social movements. We at MR welcome the return of this great publication and movement of the U.S. left.

Making War on the Planet

2018-09-24T00:21:30-04:00

The dangers posed by climate change have inspired a desperate search for technological fixes in the form of geoengineering—massive human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or planet. But as long as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming remains subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, any attempt to implement such schemes will prove fatal to humanity.

South Africa's 'Radical Economic Transformation'

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

The South African political class appears to have finally recognized the depth of the crisis into which the country's capitalist system has sunk. Can the government's new Radical Economic Transformation program begin to address the profound inequalities that remain at the heart of South African society?

The Reserve Army of Labor in China's Economy, 1991–2015

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

Since the late 1990s, China's economic expansion has depended on an immense pool of cheap labor. Today, as wages increase and manufacturing operations leave the country, there are constant complaints about shortages of peasant workers. But has China really entered a new era of labor shortage?

Rural Communities and Economic Crises in Modern China

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

Throughout China's nearly seventy-year history of industrialization and financialization, whenever the cost of an economic crisis could be transferred to the rural sector, capital-intensive urban industries have had a "soft landing" and existing institutional arrangements have been maintained—a pattern that continues today. We argue that Chinese peasants and rural communities have rescued the country from no fewer than ten such economic crises.

Beyond the Class–Race Binary

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

In his insightful new book, the historian David Roediger raises critical questions for scholar-activists seeking to understand white racism and contemporary capitalism and its class realities. He joins a long line of thinkers who have clearly recognized the need for both specifically racial and more universal, class-oriented programs of major social and economic change.

She Works Like a Man; If a Woman's Word

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

Linda Backiel is a criminal defense attorney practicing in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

'The Deadly Implications of Capital for the Human Habitat'

2018-09-24T00:21:29-04:00

In October 1992, MR founding editor Paul M. Sweezy wrote the following brief letter, published here for the first time, to Mészáros in response to an interview with Chris Arthur and Joseph McCarney that had just been published in Radical Philosophy. Sweezy saluted the critical significance of Mészáros’s argument on “the monstrous power of capital,” and the failure of many Marxists to perceive this problem in its full dimensions. He also affirmed the imperative of incorporating the ecological economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

Metabolic Rift and the Human Microbiome

2018-07-02T05:24:15-04:00

Metabolic rift theory can deepen our understanding of the human microbiota—organisms living on and inside of humans—and the ways that capitalism has disrupted these microbial ecosystems, with serious consequences for our health.

Marx, Value, and Nature

2018-09-24T00:21:30-04:00

In recent years ecological critiques of capitalism have deepened and multiplied, resulting in new debates over the conception, scope, and purpose of Marx's value theory and its relation to the natural world.