John Bellamy Foster is editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. Hannah Holleman is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation and an associate professor of sociology at Amherst College.
The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory over the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia by Alexander Bogdanov.
Aleksandra Djurasovic is an independent researcher with academic interests in urbanism, ecology, and post-socialist, neoliberal, and war-to-peace transitions in Southeast Europe, among other topics. Milan Djurasovic is a published author of two books of fiction and numerous articles on politics, psychology, literature, and art.
Alexander A. Bogdanov’s novel
Red Star was published in 1908 as an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.