February 20, 2024
Rather than the standard chronological approach Krausz outlines Lenin’s politics thematically. After a concise biographical sketch the book highlights the importance of Lenin’s analysis of Russian capitalism in the future development of his politics.
February 20, 2024
There are conspiracies! Some are secret and others overt. The most important of them usually have a public and a private aspect. Yet even those with plenty of data in the full light of day are secret in one sense: they are barely known by the general public and mostly ignored by those who are supposed to be telling us what is going on and what makes things happen: scholars, journalists, and pundits. Thus the obscurity of the Council on Foreign Relations. It may surface as a tagline for the wise men and women of NPR and PBS forums, but its workings and impact remain largely unexamined.
February 20, 2024
In early 1917, as Britain was bogged down in a war it feared would never end, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters, and her son were brought to trial and imprisoned for plotting the assassination of Prime Minister Lloyd George, who they believed had betrayed the suffrage movement. In this highly evocative and haunting play, British historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham illuminates the lives and struggles of those who opposed the war…
February 20, 2024
Consistent with his characteristic jargon-free, readable style, Robert W. McChesney’s new collection, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, is a deep yet accessible primer for his decades of work on journalism, politics, and political economy. The volume showcases over a decade of McChesney’s work and provides overviews and additions to some of his most important contributions during the period, including The Death and Life of American Journalism, Digital Disconnect, and Dollarocracy.
February 20, 2024
Celebrating the life of the activist and author, who died on the morning of October 5 The following essay by Grace Lee Boggs, which originally appeared in Monthly Review magazine,… READ MORE
February 20, 2024
Contemporary history is neither a series of random occurrences nor the predetermined plaything of a small cabal of super-empowered conspirators. The truth is somewhere in-between. A sizeable cadre of class- and system-conscious deep-state and imperial planners from the heights of concentrated private and governmental power join together to shape the outlines of much of recent history.
February 20, 2024
Come to a book party celebrating the launch of Gerald Horne’s Confronting Black Jacobins forthcoming from Monthly Review Press Tamiment Library, New York University Friday, October 30, 6-8 pm 70… READ MORE
February 20, 2024
Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.
February 20, 2024
Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have recently identified a political point of entry that has the potential to galvanize wide public support and focus political discussion and debate on the most glaring (historical) weaknesses of capitalism as a mode of production and to begin to nudge public awareness toward the deep contradictory ontology that is capitalism.
February 20, 2024
Reconstructing Lenin is a thoughtful and compelling study of Lenin. Tamás Krausz reveals Lenin as an activist revolutionary whose thoughts were shaped by immediate political events but who also at the same time never strayed far from a coherent theoretical framework. As a work of scholarship it deserves to be up there with Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.
