Monthly Review

Dec 1, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

As a college student, Li would come to “embrace modern values” and transformed himself into a “globally oriented intellectual.” Like many of his republican-aligned classmates, he “shared [the prevailing] mood of absorbing new cultural elements” from many international sources (35). These included cultural and philosophical concepts from Russia, Germany, and France; political theory from the United States and United Kingdom; and a modernization agenda funneled through Japan.

Dec 1, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | Marge Piercy

Angry entitled white menwith fancy guns that can firefaster than thought killand kill and plan to kill moreas they flee their massacres. Children make good prey. They can’t fire back or runfast enough. Assault weaponsdon’t leave TV’s tidy corpses. They rip bodies apart, tearorgans to chopped meat,a bloody mess to identify. What pleasure does killing give? Does ending the lives of othersmake yours suddenly worthwhile?

Nov 14, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | William Costa |Paraguayan Sorrow

By William Costa, translator of the recently released book, Paraguayan Sorrow, for The GuardianWhen the Spanish anarchist writer Rafael Barrett was smuggled back into Paraguay near the small town of Yabebyry in 1909, he was unrecognisable as the young newspaper correspondent who had arrived in the troubled nation five years earlier to cover an armed revolution. Physically, he was being consumed by a tuberculosis infection that would kill him the following year.

Nov 14, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | Seth Sandronsky

By Seth Sandronsky, for CounterpunchThe late István Mészáros analyzes political theories from the ancient Greek philosophers forward in Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, ed. and introduction, John Bellamy Foster (Monthly Review Press, 2022), 482 pp. The author’s premise is that the state and capitalism dovetail to exploit people and Mother Nature for profit, a contradiction humanity must overcome to build a sustainable society.

Nov 1, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | Say Burgin

is an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College and author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit (New York University Press, 2004). Dan Berger, Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey (New York: Basic Books, 2023), 400 pages, $32, hardcover. When it was founded in the winter of 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Atlanta Project was not necessarily created to do SNCC-style community organizing.