Comrades,

Moves to remove Ellen Wood as an editor of Monthly Review are underway.
Please find below a letter addressed to members of the Board of the
Monthly Review Foundation. Hope you will sign it. Please include your
name and (if applicable) your affiliation at the bottom of the letter
(following 'Yours in solidarity,'). Pass it on to anyone else who might
be supportive. A modest number of signatures has been collected in the
past three days -- among them Chomsky, Brenner, Aijaz Ahmad -- but time
is short. Please address your reply directly to me, at
[log in to unmask]

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To Members of the Board of the Monthly Review Foundation

Dear friends,

 We are writing to express our alarm about reports that some Board
members of the MR Foundation are seeking the resignation or removal of
Ellen Meiksins Wood as an editor of Monthly Review. We believe such a
move would do irreparable damage to MR▓s future as a significant
institution of the socialist left. As people who have read, subscribed
to, supported, and written for Monthly Review, we implore you to do
whatever is necessary to prevent Ellen▓s resignation or removal.

 We are well aware that we lack knowledge of the specific disputes and
grievances, imagined or real, which have caused some Board members to
contemplate this destructive course of action. Yet, this can be
something of an advantage at a moment like this. Removal from the
day-to-day operations often provides a distance from which to better see
the larger picture. And what we see is a terrible threat to MR▓s
position as a major institution of the left.

 One of the great and enduring strengths of MR has been its spirit of
socialist pluralism √ its tolerance, indeed encouragement, of a range of
differences and viewpoints that inhabit a common space of critical
Marxism, of an independent socialism that, as Paul Sweezy puts it in the
May 1999 MR is "revolutionary, non-reformist, non-revisionist and at the
same time non-dogmatic, non-fundamentalist." The addition of Ellen as an
editor fit beautifully with this ethos. The author of many major books
of socialist scholarship, Ellen▓s work is distinguished by its critical,
independent, non-sectarian spirit and its exceptional originality. When
Paul and Harry wrote in the March 1997 MR that, with Ellen▓s appointment
as an editor, they had an answer √ and "a good one" √ to the "essential
continuity" of MR, we agreed wholeheartedly. We couldn▓t imagine a
better person to carry forward MR▓s commitment to intelligent,
thoughtful and provocative socialist analysis. And her untiring work on
behalf of Monthly Review over the past three years has fully vindicated
that judgment. To throw away everything that the addition of Ellen has
meant to MR would be irresponsible and reckless in the extreme.

 What Noam Chomsky wrote in MR▓s November 1999 fundraising appeal bears
quoting in this context. We all appreciate, he wrote, the importance of
"stable, long-lasting institutions of an independent left √ reliable,
searching, stimulating thought and debate without the debilitating
factionalism that has been such a painful internal barrier to progress."

"I have to admit," he continued, "that a while back, I was personally
concerned about the continuity of this enterprise, which has played such
a critically important role. With Ellen now taking on a leading role,
those concerns are gone. There couldn▓t have been a finer choice . . ."

We agree √ as, we think, do hundreds upon hundreds of others who have
supported MR over the years. A move to push Ellen out of Monthly Review
could only hurt the magazine and damage MR▓s public image, its
reputation as a bastion of socialist sanity free of the splits, purges
and factionalism that have repeatedly undermined the left.

We call on all members of the Board of the Monthly Review Foundation to
do everything in their power to avert this course of events. We implore
you to find the intelligence, good sense, solidarity, and generosity of
spirit to resolve differences without a damaging and debilitating
parting of the ways. You owe it to yourselves. And you owe it to the
many of us who look to MR for another fifty years of work "stimulating
thought and debate without the debilitating factionalism that has been
such a painful barrier to progress."

The future of a major institution of the left is yours to preserve, or
to squander. We urge you to act wisely √ and in the spirit we have come
to associate with Monthly Review.

Yours in solidarity,


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