Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

"Capitalism Towards an Uncertain Future": An Interview with Ernesto Screpanti

"Capitalism Towards an Uncertain Future": An Interview with Ernesto Screpanti

February 20, 2024

Ernesto Screpanti is a professor at the University of Siena, Italy, where he teaches on the Economics of Globalization and the Theory of Justice. He is considered a leading theorist in the ‘rethinking Marxism’ research program. His recent publications include The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism (Routledge 2001), Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels, and the Political Economy of Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), and Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis: The Uncertain Future of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press 2014). This interview, originally published in Chinese Social Science Today (n. 597, May 19, 2014), tries to briefly bring to light some of the most innovative of Screpanti’s views on Capitalism.

NEW! Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne

NEW! Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne

February 20, 2024

The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval.

July 26, Race to Revolution Book Talk in NYC

July 26, Race to Revolution Book Talk in NYC

February 20, 2024

Join MR Press author Gerald Horne for a discussion of his new book, Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow on Saturday, July 26, 6:30PM, at Sistas’ Place, 456 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn, NY.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed in UE News

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed in UE News

February 20, 2024

In the decades since the 1968 death of Martin Luther King, and especially since the 1983 establishment of a national holiday bearing his name, his ideas and goals and those of the movement he helped lead have been sanitized to make them non-threatening to the powers that be. King’s life, work and goals, and those goals of the millions of people who struggled alongside him, have been reduced to four words from one speech: “I have a dream.” But King and other leaders and participants of the civil rights movement of the 1960s had goals that went well beyond overturning the system of Jim Crow segregation in the South and regaining voting rights and full citizenship rights for African Americans. They wanted to transform America to bring economic justice to not only black people but to all working class and poor people.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed in Race & Class

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed in Race & Class

February 20, 2024

This comprehensive study on paramilitarism throughout Haiti’s history focuses particularly on the most recent wave of paramilitaries in the twenty-first century, concerning which it provides a fascinatingly detailed case study. Such groups of armed individuals, serving as irregular forces, in league with brutal militaries or as security militias have had no legitimate or legal status in Haiti – but have had, from the outset, enormous influence in shaping its history. As Sprague shows, throughout Latin America, both local elites and foreign governments have used such groups against the people to advance their own interests. But in Haiti, dictatorial regimes such as the Duvalierist dynasty took this to a new extreme. It is a legacy the country has suffered from ever since.

Ricardo Alarcón on Gerald Horne and Race to Revolution

Ricardo Alarcón on Gerald Horne and Race to Revolution

February 20, 2024

…an important intellectual event is taking place this year in the United States. Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African American studies at the University of Houston, has just added two new texts to his long and brilliant bibliography on these subjects. Last April, New York University published The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. And now, in late June, Monthly Review Press began distributing Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow.

July 27, Race to Revolution Book Talk in Baltimore, MD

July 27, Race to Revolution Book Talk in Baltimore, MD

February 20, 2024

Join MR Press author Gerald Horne for a discussion of his new book, Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow on Sunday, July 27, 7:30PM, at Red Emma’s, 30 W. North Ave. Baltimore, MD 21201

Marta Harnecker, author of A World to Build, wins the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought

Marta Harnecker, author of A World to Build, wins the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought

February 20, 2024

We’re pleased to share the news that MR Press author and Monthly Review contributor Marta Harnecker has won the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought. MR Press will publish the English edition of her prize-winning book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-first Century Socialism, in November 2014. This announcement was published by the Venezuelan news agency Agencia Venezolana de Noticias and was translated by Fred Fuentes.

Antonio Gramsci reviewed in Socialist Studies [PDF]

February 20, 2024

The fortunes of Antonio Gramsci as a Marxist thinker and Communist Party leader have been so curious it is worth foregrounding their recent past within academic and intellectual circles. Particularly in the English-speaking world, Gramsci’s popularity has undoubtedly only increased since the fall of the Soviet bloc, the advance of neoliberalism and the deeper disorganization of the Left. Such a phenomenon leaves us asking why it is that this Marxist revolutionary has been spared the same fate as Marx and Engels, who either have continued to be held in disrepute or, worse, been relegated to irrelevance.

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