The May 2024 issue of the
self-described “independent socialist magazine” Monthly Review was its
75th Anniversary issue.
Founded in May 1949 by two 1930s socialist radicals who became its first
Editors, economist Paul Sweezy and labor journalist Leo Huberman, Monthly
Review declared itself to have no allegiance to any particular left or
socialist party, although its articles all veered to the “far left,” or
“revolutionary left,” especially to those declaring themselves Marxists of one
sort or another. Over the decades, Monthly
Review carried articles mainly by intellectuals of Trotskyist or Maoist
persuasions, as well as more orthodox communists and even neo-Stalinists, but
decidedly not those who were anarchists or social democrats, as Monthly
Review’s orientation was for “revolutionary socialism” as opposed to “mere
reformism.” (However, Monthly Review
did once carry an article by Marxist-turned-anarchist Murray Bookchin highly
critical of Mayor Bernie Sander’s socialist programs in Burlington
Vermont.) Monthly Review, of course, catalogued
the various ills and crises of capitalism while always saying the only remedy
was socialism. But as it was
overwhelmingly an intellectual journal, it was appealing not so much to a
beleaguered proletariat to make the Revolution as it was for left and socialist
intellectuals to educate for socialism, especially among the young, and
proclaim themselves socialists instead.
In fact, Monthly Review steered clear of discussing programmatic
proposals, of answering the question, “What Is to Be Done Next?” except on only
one occasion, when in 1969 it effusively supported SDS (Students for a
Democratic Society, the leading 1960s New Left group in the US) recognizing the
Black Panther Party as the revolutionary “vanguard.” That was its only direct foray into concrete
left politics of any day, although it did also, in 1966, openly support the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, and split on the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia, with Editor Leo Huberman roundly denouncing it while the other
Editor, Paul Sweezy, stayed airily above the fray and discussed “revisionism”
in abstract terms, indirectly accusing Dubček and his Czech allies of engaging
in it. Further, while in 1957, on the 40th
Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had installed the “temporary”
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Editors did say critically that “forty
years was too long” for such a dictatorship, during the Sino-Soviet Split Monthly
Review came out firmly on the side of the Chinese, who were even more hardline
and authoritarian than the Soviets!
Monthly Review has gone through
many Editors since then, replacing the deceased Leo Huberman with Harry
Magdoff, and then, after the retirement and death of Paul Sweezy, having as
Editors Ellen Meiksin Wood, Robert McChesney, and presently, John Bellamy
Foster, all the while keeping its “revolutionary socialist” orientation
intact. Bellamy Foster is very much the
orthodox Marxist, looking especially to the 1930s and 1940s Communist Party of
the USA (CPUSA) as the halcyon model of socialism in America, still awaits the
final collapse of capitalism, and, as someone particularly ecologically-minded,
sees Marx as especially someone with full-throated ecological concerns, a
harbinger of contemporary ecological thinking on de-growth and only limited
sustainability being possible in a world of finite resources—something this
author sees as highly improbable coming from a thinker living entirely in the
19th Century (1818-1883, as did his friend and collaborator
Frederick Engels [1820-1895], when developmentalism and unlimited growth were
in intellectual vogue. Although, even
then, Marx and Engels had serious environmental reservations about unlimited
capitalist growth.) But that is Monthly
Review—for whom Marx and Engels were not so much great, incisive thinkers
as they were infallible prophets, whose insights are eternal and never wrong, irrelevant,
or even conditional.
But back to the 75th
Anniversary issue. Monthly Review
commemorates its anniversary with four particular cases of left nostalgia. First is a long article by Editor John
Bellamy Foster (who always writes a long article monthly for the magazine, or
else is featured in a long interview.
These are featured as “Review of the Month,” a practice begun under
Huberman and Sweezy.) on how Albert Einstein created one of his best-known
essays outside of physics for the first issue of the magazine, his short
introductory essay on the topic titled “Why Socialism?” Like all such “Reviews of the Month,” it is
excruciatingly and pedantically footnoted with every possible reference or
aside, in this particular case, with 91 such.
This author took to re-reading Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” and found it
a good essay, but not a great one. Only
eight pages long in this author’s copy of the Einstein anthology Ideas and
Opinions (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1954), Einstein’s actual discussion of the ills of capitalism and
the consequent necessity of socialism takes up only the last three of these
pages, and Einstein’s brief for socialism only the last two paragraphs! (Making it indeed a—brief brief! Yes, pun intended.) However, in the very last paragraph, Einstein
does raise the possibility that the benefits of a planned economy under
socialism could be thwarted or denied if it degenerated into bureaucracy—a
notable caveat, given than on the left, especially the orthodox Communist left,
adulation of the Soviet Union under Stalin (which prided itself on a planned
economy) was de rigueur for anyone calling himself socialist or communist, or
in many cases, even liberal or progressive!
Monthly Review’s willingness to discuss and publish such straying
from orthodoxy even got it called out by the CPUSA for possible “Trotskyite or
Titoite” deviations! (Huberman and
Sweezy responded by firmly upholding Monthly Review as not “Titoite,”
and did not even deign to address whether it was “Trotskyite”!)
In addition to being a socialist,
Einstein also viewed himself as a Zionist, and had been ever since the rise of
Nazism in his native Germany in the 1920s, which the May 2024 “Review of the
Month” tried manfully, though unsuccessfully, to downplay. Yes, Einstein was a humane Zionist, meaning
nothing more than he believed in a Jewish home in what was then Palestine, and little
more; although, citing Ideas and Opinions once again, Einstein pointedly
noted that, with the emancipation of the Jews in Europe from the ghettoization
and discrimination inflicted previously on them, many Jews gave up their Jewish
ways and tried to assimilate—only to be thwarted by antisemitism, by being
painfully reminded that, to the European Gentiles, they remained Jews, and would
always remain Jews! (pp. 181-82) Hence,
his humane Zionism.
As for the other three pieces of
nostalgia in this particular issue, there is a “Notes from the Editors”
(another regular feature of Monthly Review) on then-Editors Huberman and
Sweezy’s essentially dismissive take from 1974 that Watergate was of no major
political import as far as maintaining capitalism was concerned, and that also,
Huberman and Sweezy’s preoccupation with pollution as a specific environmental
threat brought Huberman and Sweezy into accord with Bellamy Foster’s radical
ecologism. There is a also a brief quote
from Paul Sweezy that, in response to his left critics who state otherwise, he
still upholds Marx’s Theory of Value, and a 2000 note by then-Editors Harry
Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney that the beginning of the 21st
Century was no time to abandon belief in revolutionary socialism, and that Monthly
Review readers should still keep the socialist faith. All
reminiscent of the old saying, “The more things change, the more they remain
the same.” Yes, since 1949 Stalin,
Brezhnev and Mao have died, Khrushchev and Gorbachev tried to reform Soviet
Communism and were deposed for their efforts, the dictatorial socialist Soviet
Union became the kleptocratic capitalist dictatorship Russia, China dabbled in
capitalism and transformed its formerly “pure
socialist” economy from underperformance to
world-power status, the welfare state waxed and waned but never disappeared
despite capitalist wishes otherwise, public opinion in the US and other Western
parliamentary democracies went from largely center-left to now substantially
center-right, and much else besides, yet the hoary shibboleths traceable back
to Marx and Engels are still as relevant as they ever were! Supposedly.
What will Monthly Review write on its 100th
Anniversary? No, the whole world is not
waiting and wondering!
