Monthly Review

On Creative Destruction, Myths, and Revolution

2021-01-31T22:47:02-05:00

It is a testament to the clarity and scope of Mark Jay and Philip Conklin's vision that A People's History of Detroit is replete with insights for those trying to make sense of these deeply uncertain and troubling times. In it, Jay and Conklin show that "in order to give a true 'people's history,' one must do more than condemn the malevolence of those in power and celebrate the activists who have struggled for justice; one must also come to terms with the social system in which these people lived. In our case, this means confronting the logic of capital."

Preface to the Persian Edition of The Ecological Revolution

2021-01-31T22:44:40-05:00

The Ecological Revolution was first published a little more than ten years ago in April 2009, at a time when climate change had already been recognized as a pressing global issue for over two decades, but when there was still hardly any realistic discussion of its connection to capitalism or of the immense ecological and social revolution that would be required to overcome the Earth System crisis. Let us look back to understand the historical gulf separating that time from our own.

Red Star

2021-01-31T22:41:35-05:00

Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, published in 1908, was an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.

Manipulations of Freedom

2021-01-31T22:38:57-05:00

On California's November 2020 ballot were some contentious and important issues, including Proposition 22, classifying rideshare drivers and app-based delivery workers as independent contractors. Gig economy giants Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and others spent a whopping $111 million on Prop 22. Of course, the companies had a lot to lose. If they were made to treat their drivers or delivery people as employees and compensate them accordingly, they would be bankrupted, they claimed.

The Ecological State

2021-01-31T22:34:51-05:00

Although natural constraints on supply are important, most economic scarcities that rule our lives are actually social and artificial. Supply and demand are not natural forces drifting through the air; they are contrived realities established by an interactive social environment involving governments, corporations, institutions, and classes. Supply and demand cycles are social constructs designed to answer a basic question: Who gets what?

The Drain of Wealth

2021-01-31T22:28:01-05:00

The Western European powers appropriated economic surplus from their colonies, materially and substantially aiding their own industrial transition from the eighteenth century onward, as well as the diffusion of capitalism to the regions of new European settlement. In the case of India, the concept of drain is based on the fact that a substantial part of its earnings was never permitted to accrue to the country; it was instead appropriated by the ruling power: Britain.

Notes from the Editors, February 2021

2021-01-31T22:06:09-05:00

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This month's Review of the Month on "Colonialism Before the First World War" is from chapter 9 of political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik's pathbreaking new Monthly Review Press book, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present. In it, the Patnaiks develop an original theory of imperialism, arguing that expanded reproduction of the capitalist economies in what we today call the Global North, especially Great Britain, would not have taken place without the exploitation of the countries of the Global South.

The great denial

2021-01-03T21:00:21-05:00

A new poem by Marge Piercy.

Standing with Standing Rock, Then and Now

2021-01-03T20:56:47-05:00

The story of the Indigenous movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017 has been the subject of numerous articles and documentaries, many of which depict it mainly as an environmental and climate justice campaign to stop the pipeline from crossing the Mni Sose (Missouri River), just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon's edited collection Standing with Standing Rock tells a richer and more complex story of decolonization and indigenization from the frontlines.

Fighting the "Immigrant Threat" Narrative

2021-01-03T20:54:21-05:00

Ruth Milkman's latest book is a strong scholarly response to the "immigrant threat" narrative that has been central to U.S. politics in the last decades. In Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, the distinguished labor and migration scholar has a clear goal: to reframe the conversation about migration and increased inequality in the United States, reversing the causal relation that blames migration for the U.S. working class's current perils.