The 75th Anniversary Issue of Monthly Review, and Left Nostalgia

 

The May 2024 issue of the self-described “independent socialist magazine” Monthly Review was its 75^th 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 40^th 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 19^th 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 75^th 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 21^st 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 100^th Anniversary?  No, the whole world is not waiting and wondering!