Monthly Review

MONTHLY REVIEW. Subtitled “An Independent Socialist Magazine,” Monthly Review became known worldwide within the Left as a key source of intellectual support for anti-imperialist revolutions in the Global South; as a point of origin of modern Marxian political economy; as a cornerstone of ecological Marxism; and as an irrepressible and independent-minded version of Marxism. Monthly Review emerged during the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy era and soon became a major bulwark against political repression. The magazine first appeared in May 1949 under the joint editorship of historian Leo Huberman (1903–1968) and economist Paul Sweezy (1910–2004). Financial backing was provided by literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, who offered $5,000 a year for three years. Albert Einstein wrote an article for the opening issue.

Monthly Review’s founding editors each brought a wealth of experience to the magazine. Huberman was chair of the Department of Social Science, New College, Columbia University, from 1938 to 1939. In 1940, he became labor editor of PM and in 1941 a columnist for U.S. Week. From 1942 to 1945, he was director of public relations and education for the National Maritime Union; in 1946–1947, he was editor of the pamphlet division of Reynal and Hitchcock. His two most prominent books were We, the People (1932) and Man’s Worldly Goods (1936). Paul Sweezy taught economics at Harvard and worked for various New Deal agencies from 1934 to 1942. During World War II, he served with the Office of Strategic Services in England, France, and Germany. Among his early works was The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942). Harry Magdoff (1913–2006), who, following Huberman’s death, joined Sweezy as coeditor of Monthly Review, was hired in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration’s National Research Project. He later worked for the Current Business Analysis Division of the Department of Commerce, where he oversaw the publication of the Survey of Current Business, and in 1946 was appointed special assistant to Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace. In the 1950s, Magdoff worked as a stockbroker and financial analyst. In 1959, he joined the publishing firm Russell and Russell.

From 1997 to 2000, Marxian political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, author of The Retreat from Class (1986), for which she won the Deutscher Memorial Prize, joined Magdoff and Sweezy as a coeditor of the magazine. In 2000, following Wood’s departure, John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney joined Sweezy and Magdoff as coeditors of Monthly Review. Foster, a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, wrote the seminal work Marx’s Ecology (2000). McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy (1993) and Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999). Following the deaths of Sweezy in 2004 and Magdoff in 2006, and the resignation of McChesney in 2004, Foster has remained the sole editor of Monthly Review, supported by an editorial board.

From the start, Monthly Review advanced a non-doctrinaire approach to socialism that did not stop short of criticizing the Soviet Union and other post-revolutionary states and offered an analysis of historical trends over abstract theory. Eager to reach a wide body of educated readers, the editors stressed readability and minimized political and academic jargon. Nevertheless, Monthly Review—with print subscriptions peaking at 12,000 in the late 1970s—never intended to reach a mass audience. Addressed mainly to intellectuals and activists, the magazine adhered to the sentiment “Better Smaller but Better.” Adapted from the title of V. I. Lenin’s final essay, this slogan was utilized by Paul Baran (1909–1964), professor of economics at Stanford and a close associate of the magazine, to sum up a strategy of putting ideological clarity first and foremost.

Although maintaining a critical distance from the Soviet Union, Monthly Review was sympathetic with other Socialist countries. With the eruption of the Korean War, the coming of the Cuban Revolution, and the beginnings of US intervention in Vietnam (the first article criticizing US involvement in Indochina appeared in 1954), Monthly Review’s main focus shifted from the domestic politics to the role of US imperialism. It gained the status of the Third World journal and influenced the New Left in the 1960s. Huberman and Sweezy were among the first analysts to recognize that the Cuban Revolution would take a socialist direction. For a time, Monthly Review identified broadly with the Maoist strategy and critique of Soviet practice, publishing Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics (1977). This approach, encouraged by the Venezuelan and Bolivian Revolutions, led to Monthly Review’s development of post-1989 revolutionary theory in seminal works such as István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital (1995) and Michael Lebowitz’s The Socialist Alternative (2010).

Monthly Review Press, the book-publishing arm of Monthly Review, was founded in 1951 to serve as publisher for the celebrated author I. F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952). The publication of Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth (1957) marked the beginning of Marxian perspectives on the imperialist “development of underdevelopment” in Third World countries. Monopoly Capital (1966), by Baran and Sweezy, provided a systematic critique of the interplay among US capitalism, stagnation and economic waste, and military spending. Other core works in political economy included The Age of Imperialism (1969) by Magdoff; Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) by Harry Braverman—who was from 1967 until his death in 1976 director of Monthly Review Press; The Endless Crisis (2012) by Foster and McChesney; and Why Unions Matter (1998, 2009) by Michael D. Yates, formerly a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania-Johnstown and later director of Monthly Review Press.

Monthly Review had long been known worldwide as a major source of imperialism, dependency, and world-system analysis, beginning with the work of Baran, and including authors Che Guevara. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Andre Gunder Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Arghiri Emmanuel, John Smith, and Intan Suwandi. The critique of racial capitalism had been crucial to Monthly Review from its very beginnings, with its authors including such important Black Marxist theorists as Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham (Du Bois), Lorraine Hansberry, Gerald Horne, Robin D. G. Kelley, Malcom X, Manning Marable, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Clive Thomas, Alice Walker, and Cornel West. Monthly Review Press published the famous Combahee River Collective Statement (written primarily by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier) in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1979), edited by Zillah Einstein. In July-August 2020, a special issue of the magazine was devoted to Racial Capitalism.

Contemporary social reproduction theory within Marxist feminism dated to the publication of Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation” in the September 1969 issue of Monthly Review. Monthly Review published a special issue in September 2019 commemorating Benston and addressing the development of social reproduction theory, with contributions by such leading figures as Silvia Federici, Martha Gimenez, Selma James, Leigh Mullings, and Marge Piercy.

Building on Baran and Sweezy’s analysis of monopoly capital and stagnation, Monthly Review from the 1970s on pioneered in the critique in numerous works by Magdoff and Sweezy, culminating in Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (1986). This was followed by works, such as Foster and Fred Magdoff’s The Great Financial Crisis (2009), produced on the cusp of the 2008-2010 financial crisis. Monthly Review also pioneered in the critique of Internet monopolies and “surveillance capitalism,” a term coined by Foster and McChesney in a special issue of the magazine on the topic in July-August 2014.

Monthly Review served as the leading outlet worldwide for ecological Marxism. Foster’s Marx’s Ecology revealed the sophisticated ecological analysis embedded in Marx’s critique of political economy. Other works by authors such as Kohei Saito, Brett Clark, and Richard York deepened and expanded this analysis. In Creating an Ecological Society (2017), Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams addressed how capitalism is antithetical to sustainability and demarcated the ecological conditions for change. Monthly Review also played a prominent part in the Left struggle against climate change, marked by Fred Magdoff and Foster’s What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (2011) and Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene (2015). All of these works insist on the need for a long ecological and social revolution as the only viable path forward for humanity.

Foster, John Bellamy. The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Introduction.” In Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, edited by Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004).” Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism. London: Routledge, 2021.

Phelps, Christopher. “A Socialist Magazine in the American Century.” Monthly Review 51, no. 1 (May 1999): 1-21.

Sweezy, Paul M. “Interview.” Monthly Review 38, no. 11 (April 1987): 1-28.

Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press Website. https://monthlyreview.org/press/