Montly Review

• “‘Black Marxism’: A Marxist Critique”, by August Nimtz

  August Nimtz defends Marxism from Cedric Robinson’s accusations of myopia on matters of race, suggesting that, in charging Marx and Engels with Eurocentrism, he either failed to understand, or misrepresented, their work—and that, in effect, many thinkers inspired by Black Marxism blatantly misrepresented Marxist texts. Especially in his writings about the U.S. Civil War, Marx had far more to say about race than is commonly understood, Nimtz shows....

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• “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?'”

  The latest: Einstein's perspective links alienation and nuclear annihilation, capitalism to the devastating possibility of omnicide -- the destruction of all human life on earth. As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary....

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• Notice what Kohei Saito was reading when his career went soaring?

  In this image, Kohei Saito holds a copy of "Monopoly Capital," by Baran and Sweezy. Saito’s book "Capital in the Anthropocene" (not to be confused with John Bellamy Foster's book by a similar name) has become an unlikely hit among younger readers...

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• John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”

  The latest: The title of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book "derives from Lucretius’s famed De Rerum Natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius wrote:
  “Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order – if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will break the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect – what is the source of the free [will] … .” ([On the Nature of Things,] Book II, 251ff)
  This exact quotation, moreover, was one made by Karl Marx in his Epicurean Notebooks, compiled in preparation for his doctoral thesis: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” of 1841. From this point of departure, Foster initiates the reappraisal of two thousand years of philosophical controversy...."

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• New! Matthew Stanley’s “The Ragged Edge of Freedom”

  The latest, from Paul Buhle: "Abolitionists and social reformers of all kinds, with a wide Yankee following augmented by many recent German immigrants, sought to take things beyond the uneasy accommodation of white populations to each other across existing political lines. In Wisconsin and in Chicago most notably, these would include “Abe’s Boys” enrolling in the army of the Union. Not so in the Southern Illinois, two hours’ drive from my hometown. The whites who immigrated northward from the near South, largely uneducated and lacking skills, came to be considered almost a species in themselves...."

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