Monthly Review — BrandWiki

Monthly Review

editor	John Bellamy Foster
category	Communism, Marxism, socialism, political economy, economics, social science, philosophy
language	English
publisher	Monthly Review Foundation
founded	1949
country	United States
based	New York City
frequency	Monthly (double issue July–August)
oclc	241373379
issn	0027-0520

The Monthly Review is an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. Founded in 1949, it is the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the U.S. From its beginning, Monthly Review was characterized as having "a nondoctrinaire approach to socialism" that became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union.[1] The magazine was most closely linked to Third World socialism and national liberation struggles, and consequently saw its popularity grow among the New Left during the Vietnam War.

History

Establishment

Following the failure of Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 presidential election, two former Wallace supporters, and ex-Harvard colleagues, met on a New Hampshire farm where one of them was living. The two men were literary scholar and Christian socialist F. O. "Matty" Matthiessen and Marxist economist Paul Sweezy.[2]

New Left era and after

In the mid-1960s, radical political theory experienced a resurgence with the rise of the New Left in North America and Europe. Monthly Review rose in popularity with this resurgence. While remaining an intellectual magazine not oriented towards mass readership, its circulation nonetheless climbed over the next decade, approaching 9,100 in 1970 before peaking at 11,500 in 1977.

Although Monthly Review had roots in the so-called "Old Left", it was not unsympathetic to the young radical movement which grew in conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement, and with the opposition to conscription and the Vietnam War. Among those associated with the 1960s New Left, and published by Monthly Review, were C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Todd Gitlin, Carl Oglesby, David Horowitz, James Weinstein, and Noam Chomsky.[15]

The magazine's editorial staff was joined in May 1969 by radical economist Harry Magdoff, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died the previous year. Magdoff—author of The Age of Imperialism and an MR reader since its inception in 1949—bolstered the already well-developed anti-imperialist, "Third-Worldist" orientation of the publication that was fueled by revolutionary events in Cuba, China, and Vietnam.[16] A Maoist influence also made itself felt in the magazine's content from this period.[17]

Monthly Review sided with the New Left in condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.[18] The magazine also denounced the suppression of the Polish trade union "Solidarity" through martial law in 1981. In the latter case, Sweezy declared that the incident proved beyond doubt that "the Communist regimes of the Soviet bloc have become the expression and the guardians of a new rigidified hierarchical structure which has nothing in common with the kind of socialist society Marxists have always regarded as the goal of modern working class movements."[19]

With the weakening of the American Left in the 1980s, Monthly Review's circulation dropped from its peak levels back to the 8,000 range. In 1983, the magazine suffered its most severe financial crisis. As Robert McChesney writes, "the combination of recession, inflation, sharply higher printing costs, and declining circulation" resulted in an emergency appeal to subscribers, which successfully raised $100,000 to stave off insolvency.[11]

In 1997, Sweezy and Magdoff were joined on the MR editorial staff by Ellen Meiksins Wood.[20] She was a former New Left Review board member and author of The Retreat from Class (1986).[21] She stayed on as co-editor until 2000 when Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster assumed primary editorial duties.[7] McChesney remained in the role until 2004.

Political orientation

From its first issue, Monthly Review attacked the premise that capitalism was capable of infinite growth through Keynesian macroeconomic fine-tuning. Instead, the magazine's editors and contributors adhered to the Marxist perspective that capitalist economies contain internal contradictions which will ultimately lead to their collapse and reconstitution on a new socialist basis.[23]

Topics of editorial concern in Monthly Review have included poverty, and unequal distribution of wealth and income. Although not averse to discussing esoteric matters of socialist theory, the magazine was characterized by a preference for real-world economic and historical analysis, rather than doctrinaire citations of Marxist canon. Readability was emphasized and the use of academic jargon discouraged. Paul Buhle said of Huberman and Sweezy:"They urgently wanted to make Socialist ideas in the USA comprehensible, to render them less dependent upon emotional loyalties to Russia and the special pleading of Marxism-Leninism and more reliant upon historical and political analysis. Monthly Review reached mostly committed radicals, but those of a notably intellectual bent.[24]"

MR's editors argued that massive American military spending was an integral part of capitalist stabilization, that it drove corporate profits, bolstered levels of employment, and absorbed surplus production. They further argued that the illusion of an external threat to national security was necessary to sustain the spending priorities in Washington. In response, the editors challenged, via the material published in the magazine, the dominant Cold War paradigm of "Democracy versus Communism".[25]

In its early years, Monthly Review offered qualified support for the Soviet Union. Over time, however, the magazine became increasingly critical of Soviet dedication to "socialism in one country" and peaceful coexistence with the West, and began to regard the Soviets as playing a more or less conservative role in a world marked by national revolutionary movements. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, Sweezy and Huberman came to view the People's Republic of China as the actual center of the world revolutionary movement.[26]

Monthly Review never aligned with any specific political organization. The bulk of its articles were written by academics, journalists, and freelance public intellectuals, such as Tariq Ali, Isabel Allende, Samir Amin, Julian Bond, Marilyn Buck, G. D. H. Cole, Bernardine Dohrn, W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Ehrenreich, Albert Einstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Che Guevara, Lorraine Hansberry, David Harvey,Edward S. Herman, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Klare, Saul Landau, Michael Parenti, Robert W. McChesney, Ralph Miliband, Marge Piercy, Frances Fox Piven, Adrienne Rich, Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Singer, E. P. Thompson, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Raymond Williams.[7]

In 2004, MR editor John Bellamy Foster told The New York Times: "The Monthly Review... was and is Marxist, but did not hew to the party line or get into sectarian struggles."[27]

Monthly Review Press

Monthly Review Press, an allied endeavor, was launched in 1951 in response to the inability of left-wing journalist I. F. Stone to find a publisher for his book The Hidden History of the Korean War.[37] Stone's work, which argued that the ongoing armed conflict was not simply a case of Communist military aggression but rather the product of North Korean political isolation, South Korean military buildup, and border provocations, became the first title offered by the new publisher in 1952.

Other books published by Monthly Review Press in its formative years included The Present As History: Essays and Reviews on Capitalism and Socialism by Paul Sweezy (1953), The Empire of Oil by Harvey O'Connor (1955), The Political Economy of Growth by Paul Baran (1957),[38] Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution by Kwame Nkrumah (1959), Caste, Class and Race by Oliver Cromwell Cox (1948/1959),[39] Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil by Andre Gunder Frank (1962), The United States, Cuba, and Castro by William Appleman Williams (1963), Anarchism by Daniel Guerin (1965), Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton (1966),[40] Monopoly Capital by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy (1966),[41] and Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs (1969).

Harry Braverman (author of Labor and Monopoly Capital)[42] became director of Monthly Review Press in 1967. Monthly Review Press is also the U.S. publisher of The Socialist Register,[43] an annual British anthology since 1964 of leftist essays.

Among the notable books published by Monthly Review Press in the 1970s and '80s were:

In later years, Monthly Review Press published titles such as Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire (1995),[49] Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Che Guevara (1994), The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Robert W. McChesney (2000), Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society by Michel Warschawski (2000), Biology Under the Influence by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (2007),[50] The Great Financial Crisis by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2009),[51] America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth by Henry A. Giroux (2013), and Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science by Rob Wallace (2016).

In the 21st century, MR editor John Bellamy Foster embraced a form of "Degrowth" theory when he authored a series of Monthly Review Press books including Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000),[52] The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism (2011), The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020),[53] and The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and Nature (2024).[54]

The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays by E. P. Thompson (1973)
Open Veins of Latin America (English translation) by Eduardo Galeano (1973)[44]
Puerto Rican Obituary by Pedro Pietri (1973)[45]
Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral (1974)
Spiks by Pedro Juan Soto (1974)[46]
The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg (1976)
The Arabs in Israel by Sabri Jiryis (1976)[47]

Monthly Review

History

Establishment

McCarthy period

New Left era and after

Publication today

Political orientation

MR Online

Persecution of Uyghurs in China

Editors

Non-English editions

Monthly Review Press

Abstracting and indexing

Further reading

External links

References