The Monthly Review, established in 1949, is
an independent socialist magazine published
monthly in New York City. The publication
remains the longest continuously published
socialist magazine in the United States. The
journal has an impact factor of 0.460.
== History ==
=== Establishment ===
Following the failure of the independent 1948
Presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace,
two former supporters of the Wallace effort
met at the farm in New Hampshire where one
of them was living. The two men were literary
scholar and Christian socialist F.O. "Matty"
Matthiessen and Marxist economist Paul Sweezy,
who were former colleagues at Harvard University.
Matthiessen came into an inheritance after
his father died in an automobile accident
in California and had no pressing need for
the money. Matthiessen made the offer to Sweezy
to underwrite "that magazine [Sweezy] and
Leo Huberman were always talking about," committing
the sum of $5,000 per year for three years.
Matthiessen's funds made the launch of Monthly
Review possible, although the amount of the
seed money was reduced to $4,000 per year
in the second and third years by the executors
of Matthiessen's estate following his suicide
in 1950.Although Matthiessen was the financial
angel of the new publication, from the outset
the editorial task was handled by Sweezy and
his co-thinker, the left wing popular writer
Leo Huberman. The author of an array of books
and pamphlets during the 1930s and early 1940s,
the New York University-educated Huberman
worked full-time on Monthly Review from its
establishment until his death of a heart attack
in 1968.Sweezy and Huberman were complementary
figures guiding the publication, with Sweezy's
theoretical bent and writing ability put to
use for a majority of the editorial content,
while Huberman took charge of the business
and administrative aspects of the enterprise.
Sweezy remained at home in New Hampshire,
traveling down to the New York City once a
month to read manuscripts, where Huberman
conducted the day-to-day operations of the
magazine along with his wife, Gerty Huberman,
and family friend Sybil Huntington May.Briefly
joining Sweezy and Huberman as a third founding
editor of Monthly Review — although not
listed as such on the publication's masthead
— was German émigré Otto Nathan (1893-1987).
Although his time of editorial association
with MR was short, Nathan was instrumental
in obtaining what would become a seminal essay
for the magazine, a lead piece for the debut
May 1949 issue by physicist Albert Einstein
entitled "Why Socialism?"Another key contributor
during the first 15 years of MR was economist
Paul Baran, frequently considered as the third
member of an editorial troika including Sweezy
and Huberman. A tenured professor at Stanford
University, Baran was one of a very few self-identified
Marxists to teach economics at American universities
during the Cold War period. Baran worked closely
with Sweezy on a book regarded as a landmark
in Marxist theory entitled Monopoly Capital,
although he died of a heart attack prior to
the work's first publication in 1966.Monthly
Review launched in 1949 with a circulation
of just 450 copies, most of whom were personal
acquaintances of either Huberman or Sweezy.
The magazine's ideology and readership closely
paralleled that of the independent Marxist
weekly newspaper The National Guardian, established
in 1948. Despite a conservative political
climate in the United States, the magazine
quickly reached a critical mass of subscribers,
with its paid circulation rising to 2,500
in 1950 and to 6,000 in 1954.
=== McCarthy period ===
During the McCarthyism of the early 1950s,
editors Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman were
targeted for "subversive activities." Sweezy's
case, tried by New Hampshire Attorney General,
went all the way to the Supreme Court and
became a seminal case on freedom of speech
when the Court ruled in his favor.In 1953
the magazine added veteran radical Scott Nearing
to the magazine's ranks. From that date and
for nearly 20 years Nearing authored a monthly
column descriptively entitled "World Events".
During the Truman and Eisenhower years, a
number of left wing intellectuals found a
space for their work in MR, including a number
that would gain in stature in the ensuing
liberalized decade, such as pacifist activist
Staughton Lynd (1952), historian William Appleman
Williams (1952), and sociologist C. Wright
Mills (1958).
=== New Left era and after ===
From the middle years of the 1960s, radical
political theory saw a resurgence in association
with the emergence of a New Left in Europe
and North America. Monthly Review grew in
stature in tandem with this resurgence. While
remaining an intellectual journal not oriented
towards acquiring a mass readership, circulation
of the publication nonetheless grew throughout
this era, approaching 9,100 in 1970 before
peaking at 11,500 in 1977.While MR remained
essentially a publication with roots in the
so-called "Old Left", it was not unfriendly
to the young radical movement which grew in
conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement
and the opposition to conscription and the
Vietnam War. Among those associated with the
1960s New Left published by the Monthly Review
were C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Todd
Gitlin, Carl Oglesby, David Horowitz, and
Noam Chomsky.The Monthly Review editorial
staff was joined in May 1969 by radical economist
Harry Magdoff, replacing Leo Huberman, who
had died in 1968. Magdoff, a reader of the
publication from its first issue in 1949,
bolstered the already well-developed "Third-Worldist"
orientation of the publication, based upon
revolutionary events in Cuba, China, and Vietnam.
Certain Maoist influence made itself felt
in the content of the publication in this
period.Monthly Review became steadily more
critical of the Soviet Union in the 1960s
and 1970s, with editor Paul Sweezy objecting
to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 and the suppression of the Polish trade
union "Solidarity" through martial law in
1981. In the latter case, Sweezy declared
the incident had proved beyond doubt that
...the Communist regimes of the Soviet bloc
have become the expression and the guardians
of a new rigidified hierarchical structure
which has nothing in common with the kind
of socialist society Marxists have always
regarded as the goal of modern working class
movements."
Despite an apparent decline of the American
Left in the 1980s, MR's circulation hovered
in the 8,000 range throughout the decade.
=== Publication today ===
Since 2006 John Bellamy Foster has been the
sole editor, together with Michael D. Yates,
as associate editor, two assistant editors,
and an editorial committee.
== Political orientation ==
From its first issue, Monthly Review attacked
the premise that capitalism was capable of
infinite growth through Keynesian macroeconomic
fine-tuning. Instead, the magazine's editors
and leading writers have remained true to
the traditional Marxist perspective that capitalist
economies contain internal contradictions
which will ultimately lead to their collapse
and reconstitution on a new socialist basis.
Topics of editorial concern have included
poverty, unequal distribution of incomes and
wealth, racism, imperialism in relations between
economically developed and less developed
nations, and inefficiencies in production
and distribution seen as endemic to the capitalist
system.Although not averse to discussion of
esoteric matters of socialist theory, MR was
generally characterized by an aversion to
doctrinaire citations of Marxist canon in
favor of the analysis of real-world economic
and historical trends. Readability was emphasized
and the use of academic jargon discouraged.Editors
Huberman and Sweezy argued as early as 1952
that massive and expanding military spending
was an integral part of the process of capitalist
stabilization, driving corporate profits,
bolstering levels of employment, and absorbing
surplus production. They argued the illusion
of an external military threat was required
to sustain this system of priorities in government
spending; consequently, effort was made by
the editors to challenge the dominant Cold
War paradigm of "Democracy versus Communism"
in the material published in the magazine.In
its editorial line Monthly Review offered
critical support of the Soviet Union during
its early years although over time the magazine
became increasingly critical of Soviet dedication
to Socialism in One Country and peaceful coexistence,
seeing that country as playing a more or less
conservative role in a world marked by national
revolutionary movements. After the Sino-Soviet
split of the 1960s, Sweezy and Huberman soon
came to see the People's Republic of China
as the actual center of the world revolutionary
movement.Monthly Review remained true to an
independent orientation throughout its history
and never aligned with any specific revolutionary
movement or political organization. Many of
its articles have been written by academics,
journalists, and freelance public intellectuals,
including Albert Einstein, Tariq Ali, Isabel
Allende, Samir Amin, Julian Bond, Marilyn
Buck, G. D. H. Cole, Bernardine Dohrn, W.
E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Ehrenreich, Andre Gunder
Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Che Guevara, Lorraine
Hansberry, Edward Herman, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael
Klare, Saul Landau, Michael Parenti, Robert
W. McChesney, Ralph Miliband, Marge Piercy,
Frances Fox Piven, Adrienne Rich, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Daniel Singer, E. P. Thompson, Immanuel
Wallerstein, and Raymond Williams.In 2004,
Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster
told the New York Times
"The Monthly Review... was and is Marxist,
but did not hew to the party line or get into
sectarian struggles."
== 
Non-English editions ==
In addition to the U.S.-based magazine, there
are seven sister editions of Monthly Review.
They are published in Greece; Turkey; Spain;
South Korea; as well as separate English,
Hindi, and Bengali editions in India.
== Monthly Review Press ==
Monthly Review Press, an allied endeavor,
was launched in 1951 in response to the inability
of the maverick left-wing journalist I. F.
Stone to otherwise find a publisher for his
book The Hidden History of the Korean War.
Stone's work, which argued that the still
ongoing Korean War was not a case of simple
Communist military aggression but was rather
the product of political isolation, South
Korean military buildup, and border provocations,
became the first title offered by the MR Press
in 1952.Titles published by the press in its
formative years include: The Empire of Oil
by Harvey O'Connor (1955), The Political Economy
of Growth by Paul Baran (1957), The United
States, Cuba, and Castro by historian William
Appleman Williams (1963), Fanshen: A Documentary
of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William
Hinton (1966), Monopoly Capital by Paul A.
Baran and Paul M. Sweezy (1966), the English
translation of Open Veins of Latin America
by Eduardo Galeano (1973), and Unequal Development
(1976) and Eurocentrism (1989) by Samir Amin.Harry
Braverman (author of Labor and Monopoly Capital)
became director of Monthly Review Press in
1967. The present director of the Press is
Michael D. Yates (author of Naming the System).
In later years Monthly Review Press has published
such titles as: Marx's Ecology by John Bellamy
Foster; Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé
Césaire; The Great Financial Crisis by Fred
Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster; and Biology
under the Influence by Richard Lewontin and
Richard Levins. MR Press is also the U.S.
publisher of The Socialist Register, a long-running
annual series of topical essays written by
radical academics and activists.
== MRzine ==
From 2005 to 2016, Monthly Review published
an associated website, MRzine. At its closure,
Monthly Review announced that it would maintain
an online archive of the site.
== Abstracting and indexing ==
According to the Journal Citation Reports,
the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 0.460,
ranking it 107th out of 161 journals in the
category "Political Science".
== Editors ==
Monthly Review has had six editors listed
on its masthead:
Paul Sweezy, from 1949 to his death in 2004
Leo Huberman from 1949 to his death in 1968
Harry Magdoff from 1969 to his death in 2006
Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1997–2000
Robert W. McChesney, 2000–2004
John Bellamy Foster, May 2000–present
== Footnotes ==
== Further reading ==
Paul A. Baran, The Longer View. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1969.
Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Rethinking
Marxism: Essays for Harry Madgoff and Paul
Sweezy. Brooklyn, NY: Audomedia, 1985.
Savran, S.; Tonak, E. A.; Sweezy, P. M. (1987).
"Interview with Paul M. Sweezy". Monthly Review.
38 (11): 1. doi:10.14452/MR-038-11-1987-04_1.
"From the Left: Harry Magdoff; A Free-Market
Failure," New York Times, November 1, 1987.
Robert W. McChesney, "The Monthly Review Story:
1949-1984," MRzine, June 5, 2007.
Attewell, Paul A. (1984). Radical political
economy since the sixties: a sociology of
knowledge analysis. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press. ISBN 0813510538. OCLC 10230097.
== External links ==
Official website
Monthly Review Press: publishing house and
catalog
Monthly Review Archives
