History
Establishment
Following the failure of the independent 1948 presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace, two former supporters of the Wallace effort met at the farm in New Hampshire where one of them was living. The two men were literary scholar and Christian socialist F.O. "Matty" Matthiessen and Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, who were former colleagues at Harvard University. Matthiessen came into an inheritance after his father died in an automobile accident in California and had no pressing need for the money. Matthiessen made the offer to Sweezy to underwrite "that magazine [Sweezy] and Leo Huberman were always talking about," committing the sum of $5,000 per year for three years. Matthiessen's funds made the launch of Monthly Review possible, although the amount of the seed money was reduced to $4,000 per year in the second and third years by the executors of Matthiessen's estate following his suicide in 1950. [1]
Although Matthiessen was the financial angel of the new publication, from the outset the editorial task was handled by Sweezy and his co-thinker, the left wing popular writer Leo Huberman. The author of an array of books and pamphlets during the 1930s and early 1940s, the New York University-educated Huberman worked full-time on Monthly Review from its establishment until his death of a heart attack in 1968. [2]
Sweezy and Huberman were complementary figures guiding the publication, with Sweezy's theoretical bent and writing ability put to use for a majority of the editorial content, while Huberman took charge of the business and administrative aspects of the enterprise. Sweezy remained at home in New Hampshire, traveling down to New York City once a month to read manuscripts, where Huberman conducted the day-to-day operations of the magazine along with his wife, Gerty Huberman, and family friend Sybil Huntington May. [3]
Briefly joining Sweezy and Huberman as a third founding editor of Monthly Review — although not listed as such on the publication's masthead — was German émigré Otto Nathan (1893–1987). Although his time of editorial association with the magazine was short, Nathan was instrumental in obtaining what would become a seminal essay for the magazine, a lead piece for the debut May 1949 issue by physicist Albert Einstein entitled "Why Socialism?" [4] [5]
Another key contributor during the first 15 years of Monthly Review was economist Paul Baran, frequently considered as the third member of an editorial troika including Sweezy and Huberman. A tenured professor at Stanford University, Baran was one of a very few self-identified Marxists to teach economics at American universities during the Cold War period. Baran worked closely with Sweezy on a book regarded as a landmark in Marxist theory entitled Monopoly Capital, although he died of a heart attack prior to the work's first publication in 1966. [6]
Monthly Review launched in 1949 with a circulation of just 450 copies, most of whom were personal acquaintances of either Huberman or Sweezy. [7] The magazine's ideology and readership closely paralleled that of the independent socialist weekly newspaper The National Guardian , established in 1948. Despite a conservative political climate in the United States, the magazine quickly reached a critical mass of subscribers, with its paid circulation rising to 2,500 in 1950 and to 6,000 in 1954. [8]
McCarthy period
During the era of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, editors Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman were targeted for "subversive activities". Sweezy's case, tried by New Hampshire Attorney General, reached the Supreme Court and became a seminal case on freedom of speech when the Court ruled in his favor. [9]
In 1953, the Monthly Review added veteran radical Scott Nearing to the magazine's ranks. From that date and for nearly 20 years Nearing authored a column descriptively entitled "World Events". During the Truman and Eisenhower years, many left-wing intellectuals found a space for their work in the magazine, including a number that would gain in stature in the ensuing liberalized decade, such as pacifist activist Staughton Lynd (1952), historian William Appleman Williams (1952), and sociologist C. Wright Mills (1958). [10]
New Left era and after
From the middle years of the 1960s, radical political theory saw a resurgence in association with the emergence of a New Left in Europe and North America. Monthly Review grew in stature in tandem with this resurgence. [11] While remaining an intellectual journal not oriented towards acquiring a mass readership, circulation of the publication nonetheless grew throughout this era, approaching 9,100 in 1970 before peaking at 11,500 in 1977. [12]
While Monthly Review remained essentially a publication with 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 the opposition to conscription and the Vietnam War. Among those associated with the 1960s New Left published by the Monthly Review were C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Todd Gitlin, Carl Oglesby, David Horowitz, and Noam Chomsky. [12]
The Monthly Review editorial staff was joined in May 1969 by radical economist Harry Magdoff, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died in 1968. Magdoff, a reader of the publication from its first issue in 1949, bolstered the already well-developed "Third-Worldist" orientation of the publication, based upon revolutionary events in Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Certain Maoist influence made itself felt in the content of the publication in this period. [13]
Monthly Review became steadily more critical of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, with editor Paul Sweezy objecting to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the suppression of the Polish trade union "Solidarity" through martial law in 1981. [14] In the latter case, Sweezy declared the incident had 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." [15]
Despite an apparent decline of the American Left in the 1980s, Monthly Review's circulation hovered in the 8,000 range throughout the decade. [16]
Between 1997 and 2000, Monthly Review was co-edited by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Magdoff and Sweezy.
Publication today
Since 2006, John Bellamy Foster has been the publication's editor. Brett Clark is the associate editor, and the magazine also has one assistant editor and an editorial committee. [17]
Treatment of Uyghurs in China
In 2020, Monthly Review republished an article from the Qiao Collective, a Chinese media platform aimed at "challenging U.S. aggression towards China." In response, a group of international scholars signed an open letter to Monthly Review condemning the article for being dismissive of China's crackdown on Uyghur Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region. The letter accused the article of "agnosticism, let alone denialism, towards what is clearly a shocking infringement of the rights of Uyghur people." The lead author of the letter was David Brophy, a historian of China at the University of Sydney. Darren Byler, an expert on Xinjiang and one of the signatories, said he hoped the letter would make it "difficult for leftist 'scholar-activists' to continue to promote Xinjiang-related disinformation." [18] [19] [20] [21]
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 leading writers have remained true to the traditional Marxist perspective that capitalist economies contain internal contradictions which will ultimately lead to their collapse and reconstitution on a new socialist basis. Topics of editorial concern have included poverty, unequal distribution of incomes and wealth.
Although not averse to discussion of esoteric matters of socialist theory, Monthly Review was generally characterized by an aversion to doctrinaire citations of Marxist canon in favor of the analysis of real-world economic and historical trends. Readability was emphasized and the use of academic jargon discouraged. [16]
Editors Huberman and Sweezy argued as early as 1952 that massive and expanding military spending was an integral part of the process of capitalist stabilization, driving corporate profits, bolstering levels of employment, and absorbing surplus production. They argued the illusion of an external military threat was required to sustain this system of priorities in government spending; consequently, effort was made by the editors to challenge the dominant Cold War paradigm of "Democracy versus Communism" in the material published in the magazine. [22]
In its editorial line Monthly Review offered critical support of the Soviet Union during its early years although over time the magazine became increasingly critical of Soviet dedication to Socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence, seeing that country 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 soon came to see the People's Republic of China as the actual center of the world revolutionary movement. [23]
Monthly Review never aligned with any specific revolutionary movement or political organization. Many of its articles have been written by academics, journalists, and freelance public intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Tariq Ali, Isabel Allende, Samir Amin, Julian Bond, Marilyn Buck, G. D. H. Cole, Bernardine Dohrn, W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Ehrenreich, Andre Gunder Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Che Guevara, Lorraine Hansberry, 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. [5]
In 2004, Monthly Review 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." [9]
Monthly Review Press
Monthly Review Press, an allied endeavor, was launched in 1951 in response to the inability of the maverick left-wing journalist I. F. Stone to otherwise find a publisher for his book The Hidden History of the Korean War . Stone's work, which argued that the still ongoing Korean War was not a case of simple Communist military aggression but was rather the product of political isolation, South Korean military buildup, and border provocations, became the first title offered by the affiliated publisher in 1952. [25]
Harry Braverman (author of Labor and Monopoly Capital ) [26] became director of Monthly Review Press in 1967. The present director of the Press is Michael D. Yates (author of Naming the System). [27] Monthly Review Press is also the U.S. publisher of The Socialist Register , [28] an annual British publication since 1964, which contains topical essays written by radical academics and activists as was coedited in part by the late Leo Panitch.
Titles published by the press in its formative years include We, the People: The Drama of America by Leo Huberman (1932), The Empire of Oil by Harvey O'Connor (1955), The Political Economy of Growth [29] by Paul Baran (1957), Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolutionby Kwame Nkrumah (1959), Caste, Class and Race by Oliver Cromwell Cox (1948/1959), Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazilby Andre Gunder Frank (1962), The United States, Cuba, and Castro by William Appleman Williams (1963), Anarchismby Daniel Guerin (1965), Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village [30] by William Hinton (1966), Monopoly Capital [31] by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy (1966), Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs (1969), The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg (1971), The Poverty of Theory and Other Essaysby E. P. Thompson (1973), the English translation of Open Veins of Latin America [32] by Eduardo Galeano (1973), Puerto Rican Obituary by Pedro Pietri (1973), Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral (1974), Spiks, by Pedro Juan Soto (1974), Unequal Development [33] by Samir Amin (1976), The Arabs in Israel by Sabri Jiryis (1976), On Education: Articles on Educational Theory and Pedagogy, and Writings for Children from "The Age of Gold" by Jose Martí and edited by Eric Foner (1979), The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' from Marx to Leninby Hal Draper (1982), The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean by Clive Y. Thomas, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Mythby Hans Koning (1987) and Eurocentrism [34] (1989) by Samir Amin. [25]
In later years, Monthly Review Press has published such titles as Discourse on Colonialism [35] by Aimé Césaire (1995), Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Che Guevara (1994), Haiti: State Against Nation by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1996), 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 [36] by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (2007), Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolutionby Clairmont Chung (2008), The Great Financial Crisis [37] by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2009), America's Education Deficit and the War on Youthby Henry A. Giroux (2013), Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Scienceby Rob Wallace (2016), Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau by Stephanie J. Urdang (1975/2017), The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Centuryby Gerald Horne (2020), as well as Marx's Ecology, [38] The Return of Nature and other titles by Monthly Review Magazine editor John Bellamy Foster.
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review. He is best remembered for his contributions to economic theory as one of the leading Marxian economists of the second half of the 20th century.
Francis Otto Matthiessen was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars. It also established American Renaissance as the common term to refer to American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. Matthiessen was known for his support of liberal causes and progressive politics. His contributions to the Harvard University community have been memorialized in several ways, including an endowed visiting professorship.
The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.
Paul Alexander Baran was an American Marxist economist. In 1951 Baran was promoted to full professor at Stanford University and Baran was the only tenured Marxian economist in the United States until his death in 1964. Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth in 1957 and co-authored Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy.
Leo Huberman was an American socialist economist. In 1949 he founded and co-edited Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy. He was the chair of the Department of Social Science at New College, Columbia University; labor editor of the newspaper PM; and the author of the popular history books Man’s Worldly Goods and We, the People: The Drama of America.
Harry Samuel Magdoff was a prominent American socialist commentator. He held several administrative positions in government during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and later became co-editor of the Marxist publication Monthly Review.
Harry Braverman (1920–1976) was an American Marxist, worker, political economist and revolutionary. Born in New York City to a working-class family, Braverman worked in a variety of metal smithing industries before becoming an editor at Grove Press, and later Monthly Review Press, where he worked until his death at the age of 55 in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Braverman is most widely known for his 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, "a text that literally christened the emerging field of labor process studies" and which in turn "reinvigorated intellectual sensibilities and revived the study of the work process in fields such as history, sociology, economics, political science, and human geography."
James Boggs was an American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married to philosopher activist Grace Lee Boggs for forty years until his death.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist political theorist and historian.
István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its "structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
Michael D. Yates is an economist and a labor educator, and editorial director of the socialist publishing house Monthly Review Press.
Marcel Liebman was a Belgian Marxist historian of political sociology and theory, active at the Université libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order is a 1966 book by the Marxian economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. It was published by Monthly Review Press. It made a major contribution to Marxian theory by shifting attention from the assumption of a competitive economy to the monopolistic economy associated with the giant corporations that dominate the modern accumulation process. Their work played a leading role in the intellectual development of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. As a review in the American Economic Review stated, it represented "the first serious attempt to extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism." It attracted renewed attention following the Great Recession.
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century is a book about the economics and sociology of work under monopoly capitalism by the political economist Harry Braverman. Building on Monopoly Capital by Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, it was first published in 1974 by Monthly Review Press.
The International Socialist Review was a monthly magazine published in Chicago, Illinois by Charles H. Kerr & Co. from 1900 until 1918. The magazine was chiefly a Marxist theoretical journal during its first years under the editorship of A.M. Simons. Beginning in 1908 the publication took a turn to the left with publisher Charles H. Kerr taking over the main editorial task. The later Review featured heavy use of photographic illustration on glossy paper and mixed news of the contemporary labor movement with its typical theoretical fare.
Neo-Marxism is a collection of Marxist schools of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences.
The theory of imperialism refers to a range of theoretical approaches to understanding the expansion of capitalism into new areas, the unequal development of different countries, and economic systems that may lead to the dominance of some countries over others. These theories are considered distinct from other uses of the word imperialism which refer to the general tendency for empires throughout history to seek power and territorial expansion. The theory of imperialism is often associated with Marxist economics, but many theories were developed by non-Marxists. Most theories of imperialism, with the notable exception of ultra-imperialism, hold that imperialist exploitation leads to warfare, colonization, and international inequality.
Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957), was a case before the United States Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that jailing an academic when he refused to answer questions about university lectures he had given was a violation of due process. On a larger scale, the decision established constitutional protections for academic freedom and reined in the investigative powers of state legislatures.
