Monthly Review

• 1. Introduction

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  Monthly Review, the independent socialist magazine founded in New York City in 1949, traces its origins to a quiet conversation on a New Hampshire farm. Two former Harvard colleagues had supported Henry A. Wallace's failed presidential campaign in 1948. Now, in the aftermath of that defeat, they were trying to figure out what came next for the American left. One of them, a literary scholar named F. O. Matthiessen, had recently inherited money after his father died in a car accident in California. He had no pressing need for it. So he offered to bankroll the magazine that his friend Paul Sweezy and a third colleague, Leo Huberman, had been dreaming about. The sum was $5,000 a year for three years. Out of that farm conversation came the longest continuously published socialist magazine in United States history. What made it survive McCarthyism, the collapse of the New Left, and a near-bankruptcy that required an emergency fundraiser? And what kept it publishing, in print, into the twenty-first century?

• 2. The Founding Partnership

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  Paul Sweezy was a Marxist economist; Leo Huberman was a New York University-educated author of left-wing books and pamphlets going back to the 1930s and 1940s. Their temperaments were different enough that they divided the work cleanly. Sweezy's theoretical ability and writing drove most of the editorial content. Huberman handled the business and administrative side, running the magazine's day-to-day operations from New York alongside his wife Gertrude and a family friend named Sybil Huntington May. Sweezy himself remained in New Hampshire, coming down to the city once a month to read manuscripts.

  Briefly working alongside them as a third founding editor was Otto Nathan, born in 1893 and a German emigre who never appeared on the masthead. Nathan contributed something essential to the debut issue: he was instrumental in securing an essay by Albert Einstein titled "Why Socialism?" as the lead piece for the May 1949 launch. Also frequently considered a de facto third member of the editorial core was economist Paul Baran, who shaped the magazine's voice across its first fifteen years.

  Huberman gave himself to the project entirely. He worked full-time at Monthly Review from its first issue until his death from a heart attack in 1968. In that time, the magazine grew from a newsletter-scale publication of 450 subscribers, most of them personal acquaintances of the two editors, to a recognized voice of the American left.

• 3. Surviving McCarthyism

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  Paid circulation had climbed to 2,500 by 1950 and reached 6,000 by the mid-1950s. That growth happened against the grain. The McCarthyism era made being publicly socialist in the United States a legally consequential act. Sweezy, who was teaching at the University of New Hampshire at the time, was subpoenaed by New Hampshire Attorney General Louis C. Wyman. He refused to answer questions about his lecture notes or his political beliefs. Found in contempt of court, he appealed the conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in his favor in the case known as Sweezy v. New Hampshire.

  The magazine did not go quiet under pressure. Veteran radical Scott Nearing joined its ranks in 1953 and authored a column called "World Events" for nearly twenty years. The publication also broke from its usual austere visual style to feature labor cartoonist Fred Wright during the 1950s. Throughout the Truman and Eisenhower years, Monthly Review published pacifist activist Staughton Lynd, historian William Appleman Williams, and sociologist C. Wright Mills, with Lynd and Williams appearing as early as 1952 and Mills in 1958.

  The editorial line during these years challenged what Monthly Review saw as the dominant Cold War framing: the binary of Democracy versus Communism. The editors argued that massive American military spending was not simply a security measure but a mechanism for stabilizing capitalist economies, generating corporate profits, and absorbing surplus production.

• 4. The New Left Years

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  By the mid-1960s, the political landscape in North America and Europe had shifted again. Radical political theory was experiencing a resurgence. Monthly Review's circulation climbed throughout this period, approaching 9,100 in 1970 before reaching its all-time peak of 11,500 in 1977. The magazine had its roots in what was called the Old Left, but it was not hostile to the new generation of activists energized by the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. Among those associated with the 1960s New Left whom the magazine published were Herbert Marcuse, Todd Gitlin, Carl Oglesby, David Horowitz, and Noam Chomsky.

  In May 1969, radical economist Harry Magdoff joined the editorial staff to replace Huberman. Magdoff was the author of The Age of Imperialism and had been a reader of Monthly Review since its very first issue in 1949. His arrival strengthened the magazine's already strong anti-imperialist orientation, shaped in those years by revolutionary events in Cuba, China, and Vietnam. A Maoist influence also entered the magazine's content during this period.

  Monthly Review's position on the Soviet Union had been shifting over time. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, Sweezy and Huberman had come to view the People's Republic of China as the true center of the world revolutionary movement. The magazine had sided with the New Left in condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And when Poland's Solidarity trade union was suppressed through martial law in 1981, Sweezy wrote that the incident proved the Communist regimes of the Soviet bloc had become guardians of a rigidified hierarchical structure with nothing in common with the socialist goal that Marxists had always pursued.

• 5. Crisis and Continuity

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  With the weakening of the American left in the 1980s, Monthly Review's circulation fell back from its peak to the 8,000 range. The year 1983 brought the magazine's most severe financial crisis. As Robert McChesney would later document, the combination of recession, inflation, sharply higher printing costs, and declining readership forced the magazine to make an emergency appeal to its subscribers. The appeal worked: the magazine raised $100,000 and avoided insolvency.

  In 1997, editor Ellen Meiksins Wood joined Sweezy and Magdoff on the masthead. Wood was a former board member of the New Left Review and the author of The Retreat from Class, published in 1986. She remained as co-editor until 2000, when Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster took on primary editorial responsibilities. McChesney stepped back from that role in 2004. Paul Sweezy, one of the two original editors, died that same year, fifty-five years after the magazine launched. Harry Magdoff, who had joined in 1969, died in 2006.

  Since 2000, John Bellamy Foster has served as Monthly Review's editor, with Sarah Kramer as assistant editor and Brett Clark as associate editor. Foster's own editorial interests have shaped the magazine's engagement with ecological theory, reflected in a series of books he authored for Monthly Review Press including Marx's Ecology in 2000, The Ecological Revolution in 2009, The Return of Nature in 2020, and The Dialectics of Ecology in 2024.

• 6. Monthly Review Press

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  Monthly Review Press came into existence in 1951, two years after the magazine itself, under circumstances that said something about the American publishing climate of that era. Left-wing journalist I. F. Stone could not find a commercial publisher for his book The Hidden History of the Korean War. Stone's argument was that the conflict was not simply a case of Communist military aggression but the result of North Korean political isolation, South Korean military buildup, and border provocations. Monthly Review Press published it as its first title in 1952.

  The press grew steadily through the following decades. Early titles included Paul Sweezy's essay collection The Present As History in 1953, Harvey O'Connor's The Empire of Oil in 1955, Paul Baran's The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, and Kwame Nkrumah's Consciencism in 1959. The 1960s brought Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital in 1966 and William Hinton's documentary account of land reform in China, Fanshen, also in 1966. Harry Braverman, later the author of Labor and Monopoly Capital, became director of Monthly Review Press in 1967.

  The 1970s and 1980s added Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America in English translation in 1973, E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory in 1973, and Rosa Luxemburg's selected writings on The National Question in 1976. Monthly Review Press is also the U.S. publisher of The Socialist Register, a British annual anthology of leftist essays that has been running since 1964. The press later published Che Guevara's Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War in 1994, and Rob Wallace's Big Farms Make Big Flu in 2016.

• 7. Politics and Principles

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  From its first issue, Monthly Review rejected the idea that capitalism could achieve stable, indefinite growth through Keynesian macroeconomic management. The magazine's editors and contributors held that capitalist economies contain internal contradictions that will ultimately lead to their collapse and restructuring on a socialist basis. That position remained consistent across the magazine's history even as its specific editorial interests shifted.

  The magazine's contributors spanned a wide range of the intellectual left without aligning with any single political organization. Writers published in its pages included W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Rich, Tariq Ali, Isabel Allende, Eduardo Galeano, Eric Hobsbawm, Immanuel Wallerstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Che Guevara, among many others. Paul Buhle described what Huberman and Sweezy had been trying to do: they urgently wanted to make socialist ideas in the United States comprehensible, less dependent on emotional loyalties to Russia and the special pleading of Marxism-Leninism, and more grounded in historical and political analysis. Monthly Review reached mostly committed radicals, but those of a notably intellectual bent.

  In 2004, editor John Bellamy Foster told a reporter that Monthly Review was and is Marxist, but did not hew to the party line or get into sectarian struggles. That self-description captured something the magazine had maintained across its history: a willingness to criticize the Soviet Union, break with Maoist sympathies when events warranted, condemn Polish martial law, and publish a range of left perspectives without requiring doctrinal conformity from its contributors. The 2023 impact factor for the print edition, as recorded by the Journal Citation Reports, was 1.0, placing it 185th out of 318 publications in the political science category.