A message to friends of Monthly Review, from John Bellamy Foster: September 2022 Dear friends,   Since the 1980s, there has been a seven-fold increase in concurrent large heat waves affecting multiple regions in the medium and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. A large heat wave is defined in the scientific literature as a high-temperature event lasting three or more days, occupying at least 1.6 million square kilometers (close to the size of Alaska). Concurrent heat waves of this size or larger have increased by 46 percent in mean spatial extent over the last four decades. In the 1980s concurrent heat waves occurred approximately twenty days per year. This has now risen to 143 days, with a maximum intensity 17 percent higher. This July, concurrent heat waves spread across the Northern Hemisphere threatening the lives, living conditions, and general welfare of hundreds of millions of people. Major wildfires arose in Greece, Portugal, Spain, and France. In Spain and Portugal alone, more than 1,700 people died from the July heat waves and wildfires. Temperatures in the United Kingdom broke all historic records. In North America, tens of millions were subjected to searing heat, drought, and out-of-control wildfires. Heat waves also struck North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and China. The vast territorial range of these concurrent heat waves, stretching around the globe, indicates that heat waves and other extreme weather events emanating from climate change are now emerging as a universal phenomenon requiring universal solutions. The July-August 2022 special issue of Monthly Review titled Socialism and Ecological Survival was devoted to addressing this new, more dangerous planetary condition. The issue took as its starting point the unavoidable reality that even in the most optimistic scenario, in which a climate tipping point is avoided, the lives of hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will be periodically threatened over the next few decades by accelerating compound extreme weather events emanating from climate change, according to the latest report (AR6) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hence, it is now necessary to carry on the struggle over climate change simultaneously on two levels: (a) mitigating climate change to preserve a habitable planet for humanity (and other species) in the future, and (b) doing what is necessary to secure the survival of human communities and populations in the present. Only a program of sustainable human development rooted in substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and collective self-mobilization, we suggested, is capable of securing the human future, while also protecting the world’s most vulnerable populations. This requires a global ecological and social revolution, aimed not simply at technology, but also requiring the transformation, more fundamentally, of existing social relations. We are now at a point in history where humanity will be compelled by changing material conditions to engage in a more unified, class-based struggle against capitalism, opposing its worldwide economic exploitation, its wasting away of human lives, its military expansion and warfare, its devaluation of everyone and everything but the cash nexus, its hierarchical state system that excludes “we the people,” its imperialism, racism, and sexism, and all its other alienated, expropriative, and destructive characteristics—of human beings and innumerable other species with which we share the earth quite simply won’t survive. A revolutionary new society rooted in collective and communal needs, extending its sense of community to humanity as a whole and to the earth itself, constitutes the realm of freedom as necessity in the twenty-first century. As Michael D. Yates eloquently writes in the final sentence of his book Work Work Work (Monthly Review Press, 2022), “Time is short, and there is no reason to delay what is possible." This is Monthly Review’s message, one that we have stuck to and developed for many decades. We believe this underlying message and the detailed analysis that we are able to provide are needed now more than ever, but for that we need your help. Our voice survives in large part through the support of our Associates, who have been the bedrock of the magazine since its earliest years. Basic magazine subscriptions cover little more than the costs of printing and mailing, and electronic subscriptions, while growing, make only a modest impact on our bottom line. We have no foundation support, no endowment, no deep pockets. Please become an Associate or, if you have joined already, consider renewing at the same or a higher level. Please help us now in whatever way you can.