We are facing today the most pronounced and remarkable of all contradictions: that between what ecosocialist Ian Angus calls "capital's time" and "nature's time." As a result, a series of intertwined ecological and social crises have come together, posing existential threats to life on the planet. Everywhere, life, both human and nonhuman, is threatened, and the dangers of the imposition of capital's time on nature's time accelerate decade by decade at levels scarcely imaginable.

In 1980, the great English historian and Marxist theorist E. P. Thompson wrote the pathbreaking essay "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization." Although the world has undergone a number of significant changes since, Thompson's essay remains a useful starting point in approaching the central contradictions of our times, characterized by the planetary ecological crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, New Cold War, and current "empire of chaos"—all arising from features deeply embedded in the contemporary capitalist political economy.

This poem was published in volume 18, number 4, of Monthly Review (September 1966), from Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda, trans. Ben Belitt (Grove Press, 1961).

Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact. Writing during the grimmest period of Cold War reaction, Leacock put forward a critique of the mainstream U.S. ideology, which took for granted the idea that there were only two genders, in binary opposition to each other, and that these were the direct product of so-called male and female nature.

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 This number of Monthly Review is a special issue guest edited by Manolo De Los Santos and Vijay Prashad on The Cuban Revolution Today: Experiments in the Grip of Challenges. Although it covers the major internal struggles of the ongoing Cuban Revolution, along with the external attacks on it by Washington, one unaddressed area of critical importance, which deserves mention, is Cuba’s world leadership in sustainable human development.

We should avoid offering a fatalistic worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction. Climate change is now "code red for humanity." This is not a doomsday forecast but a call to action.

Bhagat Singh is an iconic figure of the radical left tradition in India. If Singh, killed in the resistance to British colonialism, were to return from the dead, would he feel that the India of today, brought about by its ruling classes and their political representatives, was really worth his and his comrades' martyrdom?

The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift.