Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

9/21: MR Press at the Brooklyn Book Festival (plus talk and signing with Alan Wieder)

February 20, 2024

Visit the MR Press table at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival, on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014, 10am—6pm, at Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza. Alan Wieder, author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid, will be at the MRP table for a book signing at 10:30 AM, and will be participating in a festival panel discussion at noon, “Mandela: An American Perspective.” We hope to see you there!

Nadine Gordimer’s Foreword to Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid

February 20, 2024

JOE SLOVO AND RUTH FIRST. We are entering their paths. Both grew up unbelievers in Jewish or any religious faith. They met when Ruth was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe just returned from the South African Army in the war against Nazi Germany. His motivation for volunteering, eighteen years old, unemployed, lying about being underage for military call-up—his early alliance with communism, and so to the Soviet Union under attack—was decisive in the act. But there remained the devastating racial dilemma in South Africa. He wrote: “How do you tell a black man to make his peace with General Smuts—butcher of Bulhoek and the Bondelswarts? ‘Save civilisation and democracy’—must have sounded a cruel parody. And fight with what? No black man was allowed to bear arms . . . if you want to serve democracy, wield a knobkerrie [wooden club] as a uniformed servant of a white soldier.”

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti in Telesur Online

February 20, 2024

Jeb Sprague’s book “Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti” documents how key players among Aristides’ “peaceful opponents” in Haiti, along with military and government officials from the Dominican Republic, closely supported the insurgents who killed dozens of people while the international press (and the human rights industry) ignored it and depicted some of the financiers as victims of a “crackdown on dissent”

Silvertown reviewed in Socialist Worker

February 20, 2024

The author and critic Walter Benjamin once wrote in an essay titled “On the Concept of History”: “There has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” John Tully’s new book Silvertown is a well-researched examination of that very duality–with London, the 19th century heart of bourgeois imperial culture, at its center.

Gerald Horne discusses Race to Revolution at Red Emma’s in Baltimore [video]

February 20, 2024

On July 27, Gerald Horne, a radical scholar whose historical work refocuses our attention on the structures and legacies of white supremacy and black resistance, presented his two most recent books, Race to Revolution (published by Monthly Review Press) and The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (published by New York University Press) at Red Emma’s in Baltimore. The event was recorded and video is kindly provided by our friends at Red Emma’s.

The Contradictions of “Real Socialism” in the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of actually existing socialism, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted should be read more as an exercise in the moral psychology of ‘human development’ that, for Michael Lebowitz, should supplement today’s Marxism. The crucial tenet of this kind of socialism is the idea, nay, the ideal of human development. According to the author, the main problem with the old theory and practice of Marxism is that it hosts ‘a distortion that forgot about human beings’.

Silvertown reviewed on the Radical Sydney / Radical History blog

February 20, 2024

John Tully writes in the Preface to his new book, Silvertown – The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labour Movement, (Monthly Review Press, 2014), that ‘Conservatives have attacked some of my previous work as being partisan, and this book should upset them again.’ Radical historians, however, will welcome it for precisely that reason. And treasure it, because this is a way of writing labour history – or any history – that academic historians usually run a mile from. Radical historians know that it is impossible to be non-partisan. As Tully explains, ‘Historians must always be scrupulous with the facts, but we should be deeply suspicious of claims that studies of human society can be “value free”.’

Marta Harnecker’s Remarks upon receiving the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought

February 20, 2024

On August 15, 2014, Marta Harnecker accepted the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought, awarded for her book, A World to Build: New Paths towards Twenty-first Century Socialism (forthcoming from Monthly Review Press). Available here are her remarks, translated by Federico Fuentes and originally published by Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Don’t let the title scare you. John Bellamy Foster’s The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (Monthly Review Press) is a good read and resource for making sense of the world around us. Foster edits the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, launched in 1949 with an Albert Einstein essay, and he is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. For the past three decades, Foster has been breaking new ground in writing on the ecology, economy and polity in the pages of MR and MR Press.

Steve Early interviewed by Cindy Sheehan

February 20, 2024

Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress, published by Monthly Review Press, is interviewed by Cindy Sheehan for her radio show “Cindy Sheehan’s Soap Box.”