Monthly Review

Building a Vision of the Good Life

2021-09-05T12:12:30-04:00

The crux of Kate Soper's Post-Growth Living is simple: we need to redefine "the good life." We need to move away from a culture that equates the good life with endless consumption and toward one that equates it with experiences that are not defined by the market. Not only is this transition ecologically necessary, but it will also lead to fairer, and far more pleasurable, experiences.

Cooperation Has a Meaning

2021-09-05T12:09:15-04:00

In 1970, the French left-wing filmmaker Chris Marker made a twenty-minute documentary about the French left-wing publisher François Maspero. Fleetingly, we catch a glimpse of two publications pinned side by side on one wall, seemingly granted special placement: a copy of The Black Panther newspaper and a Monthly Review. Hardly surprising is this prominence: Maspero's relationship with Monthly Review was always fraternal, both interfaced with one another, shared lists. Together, they helped define what that New in the Left would mean.

COVID-19 in the Two Koreas

2021-09-05T12:06:54-04:00

The two Koreas—sharing a language, cultural traditions, history of imperial conquest and war, and interrupted family connections—both have mostly succeeded in controlling the pandemic, within different political-economic systems and with markedly different methods.

Not a Nation of Immigrants

2021-09-05T12:04:48-04:00

"Nation of immigrants" discourse is generally used to counter xenophobic fears, but the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous people, and the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene

2021-09-05T11:59:51-04:00

Assuming that the Anthropocene will soon be officially designated as the earth's current epoch, there remains the question of the geological age with which the Anthropocene begins. Adopting the standard nomenclature for the naming of geological ages, the term Capitalinian is proposed as the most appropriate name for the new geological age, conforming to the historical period that environmental historians see as commencing around 1950, in the wake of the Second World War, the rise of multinational corporations, and the unleashing of the process of decolonization and global development.

Notes from the Editors, September 2021

2021-09-05T11:57:27-04:00

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In 2004, Washington launched a whole new strategy of financial war, based on the role of the U.S. dollar as the hegemonic foreign-exchange currency, to cut off the economic circulation of targeted states. The United States has created, as part of its "rules-based international order," a coercive global framework extending U.S. financial jurisdiction to every country, economic entity, and person engaged at any point in U.S. dollar transactions anywhere in the world.

From Sandstorm and Smog to Sustainability and Justice: China's Challenges

2021-07-05T11:34:09-04:00

In China, the orientation toward "ecological civilization" has been proposed for some years. But if the hard core of developmentalism and modernization continues to be the guiding principle, China will continue to be challenged by social injustice and environmental devastation.

Can the Chinese Diaspora Speak?

2021-07-05T11:31:59-04:00

The Chinese diaspora is compelled either to prostrate to an edifying project of assimilation to U.S. liberal democracy, or be branded as illiberal "Red Guards" unfit for serious political discourse. This discursive context has long mobilized overseas Chinese to affirm the universalism of Western liberalism in opposition to a Chinese despotism defined either by dynastic backwardness or communist depravity. Can overseas Chinese speak for themselves in the face of the West's "hegemonic right to knowledge?" Or will all such speech that challenges U.S. presuppositions of liberal selfhood and Chinese despotism simply be tuned out as illiberal noise?

The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War

2021-07-05T11:29:27-04:00

One of the key components of U.S.-China strategic competition is the technology war, the essence and implications of which can be further understood in the broader context of the international division of labor and the two countries' internal contradictions. From this front, we can decipher the antagonism between different classes/groups within and across the two countries.

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

2021-07-05T11:27:12-04:00

The war against fascism was transformed into the Cold War. U.S. imperialism, subdued somewhat by post-First World War isolationism, came into full flower. Washington implemented this sea change in many ways, including the division of the Korean Peninsula.