Introduction: a socialist magazine in the American century - 'Monthly Review'

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

In a human life, attainment of the fiftieth year, while cause for reflection, is nothing exceptional, statistically speaking. For a magazine of the American left, fifty years is a veritable eternity. Simply to reach the age is a stunning achievement.

Think of the ever-looming threats that have destroyed so many promising radical publications in the century now drawing to a close. Government harassment and repression destroyed the International Socialist Review and the Masses during the First World War. Withdrawal of financial backing caused the loss of the Seven Arts in 1917 and the Marxist Quarterly in 1937. An editor's death brought an end to the Modern Quarterly in 1940, and an editor's caprice eliminated Marxist Perspectives in 1980. Loss of perspective and declining subscriber rolls extinguished the country's greatest radical newspapers seventy years apart, the Appeal to Reason in 1922 and the Guardian in 1992. Splits or fusions in sponsoring groups or parties caused many other publications to be abandoned. Then, lest we forget, there is sheer discouragement, demoralization, disorientation, and disenchantment. Countless left-wing periodicals lie defunct and yellowing in archives, reminders of the once-great aspirations of writers and readers who watched their dreams scatter to the wind.

Some fates, on the other hand, are worse than death. Perseverence can indicate sterility instead of vitality. Year in year out, the issues may appear, but if they merely recite the same rote formulae, then the ideas are musty though the ink is fresh. Life can drain out of a project in other ways, most commonly by dilution of purpose. What profiteth a periodical if it gains the world and loses its soul? Maturity so often brings hankering for status, audiences, and influence once properly disregarded. Rationality starts to seem to require abandoning revolution, good sense to require compromise, and good taste to dictate a closer eye toward fashion. Such are the ways that a brilliant Marxist magazine like Partisan Review moves to the liberal center, finally arriving at neoconservatism.

The miracle of Monthly Review is that it is alive in all senses. It has made it to an advanced age without having lost the spring in its step, stayed true to its socialist promise while remaining alert and engaged with the world around it. What has been its secret?

1.

At risk of confusing historical materialism with crass materialism, let's start with the money. Not that anyone ever expected to make money, or did, from Monthly Review. But it is one thing to dream of a magazine, quite another to pull it off, and an essential condition for actually establishing a publication, even a radical one, on a national scale is to have the means to do it properly. You must pay the printer, the rent, the phone, the lights, the heat, the postage, and the staff. Even the writers, from time to time.

It is fortunate that any intelligent Marxist theory of history admits a role for chance, because Monthly Review might never have come to be had it not been for Cleopatra's nose - in this case, Professor F. O. Matthiessen's unanticipated inheritance.

Matty, as he was known to his friends, among them his former Harvard colleague Paul Sweezy, was a distinguished scholar of American literature, author of American Renaissance (1941), and a founder of American Studies. He was also a Christian and a socialist who rejected Marxism while freely drawing insights from it. Matty and Paul were present at the creation of the Harvard Teachers' Union in 1935.

In late autumn 1948, after the debacle of Henry Wallace's independent presidential campaign, which both men had supported, Matthiessen visited Sweezy at the family farm in New Hampshire where Paul was residing, having resigned from Harvard a few years before. After a walk outdoors, they were sitting by the fire, having a drink. Out of the blue, Matty informed Paul that he had unexpectedly inherited a considerable trust fund after his father had died as a result of an automobile accident in California. Matty was a full professor at Harvard, a successful author, with no dependents. He didn't need the money. Would Paul like it to start that magazine he and Leo Huberman were always talking about?

This windfall - a commitment of $5,000 for three years in succession, totalling $15,000, or $75,000 in today's purchasing power - made the launching of Monthly Review possible.(1)

2.

In other words, the money, as any good Marxist would have guessed, was a manifestation of social relations. Not extraction of surplus value, mind you: this gift was several steps removed from the accumulation process. Relations, rather, of friends acting in concert, the kind of social relations that have kept Monthly Review afloat ever since.

First among friends were Leo and Paul, the editors. They differed in background, one steeped in the New York left, the other in New England's higher learning, one born into the lower middle class, the other into relative privilege, one Jewish, the other Protestant. Each, though, had become a Marxist in the depth of the Depression, just as the Nazis took power in Germany. Each had studied at the London School of Economics. Each had been an editor and a writer. Just before the United States entered the Second World War, they met and became friends. Cast apart for the war's duration, they became reacquainted afterward and began to contemplate a socialist magazine of a new sort.