Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya reviewed by A World to Win

February 20, 2024

The current chaos in Libya, with striking army units blockading oil ports, widespread violence from the militias and with a wave of bombings and kidnappings, goes largely unreported.

An excellent new account of the war, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, by Horace Campbell, places the NATO adventure firmly in the context of the global capitalist crisis. Western leaders were looking for an opportunity to intervene in North Africa.

Save Our Unions reviewed in Open Media Boston

February 20, 2024

At the beginning of 2013, American workers were reeling from body blows — in Michigan among other places. How does that state transmogrify from being the heart of the labor movement to a “right-to-work (for less)” locale, taking its place alongside the Deep South? This anti-worker plague swept through surrounding states. Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, in that order, took away workers’ right to negotiate their conditions, even though this tack was defeated by a vote of the public in Ohio in November 2011. Indiana enacted a right-to-work law affecting private sector employees. A year after the Ohio vote, workers in Michigan were defeated on two referenda concerning government workers’ ability to negotiate. At that stage, what happened in the latter state shouldn’t have shocked anyone.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed by Paul Buhle in CounterPunch

February 20, 2024

This remarkable book brings back into view a radical vision for victory within the mainstream, armed with the kind of expectation glimpsed briefly in the 2008 election race but this time without the support of a grassroots movement long since vanished. The Civil Rights movement, rightly called “the Freedom Movement” by participants themselves, had built up a head of steam by the 1963 March on Washington recently so much in the news again recently, for fiftieth anniversary events. But even this momentum would not likely itself have accounted for the expectation, during an extended political moment, that Democrats might boldly seek to end poverty. The impulse rested also in the surprising prestige of one very unique socialist intellectual, Michael Harrington, who with his supporters glimpsed the opportunity to apply their revolutionary visions of social transformation to the practical (or seemingly practical) prospects before them.

America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth reviewed by the Teachers College Record

February 20, 2024

In his most recent book, America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, social critic and author Henry A. Giroux examines neoliberal and neoconservative attacks on public education and youth in the United States of America. His central argument is that schools are becoming less capable of preparing citizens with the critical minds, willingness to challenge authority, and hope to fulfill their social commitments to advancing a democratic society.

Henry Giroux interviewed by Bill Moyers

February 20, 2024

Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, recently published by Monthly Review Press. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers on the show Moyers & Company, available to watch here.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed in the Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

What do we know about recent progressive reform in the US? Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have answers for the current moment in A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today. The authors take a critical look at the Freedom Budget of 1966. If this is new to you, read on. The Freedom Budget was “a practical step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty in America during the next 10 years.” Since private business was not up to the task, government spending would bridge the gap.

The Work of Sartre reviewed in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

The 2012 release, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, delivers the long-awaited final section of Mészáros’ 1979 study on Sartre’s work. Originally intended to constitute a second volume, the analysis of Sartre’s conception of history now serves to expand and complete the original text. The stated purpose of this new edition is to fill a political lacuna inadequately addressed by postmodernism and post-structuralism, to resurrect from its bourgeois determinations the dignity of the notion of individual responsibility championed by Sartre, to pay the debt owed to Sartre by Marxists. In a time when “the future seems to be fatefully barred by capitalism’s deepening crisis”, a retrieval of the power of radical negation seems necessary so that we can admit with Sartre that “a barred future is still a future.”

Monthly Review Holiday Party in NYC

February 20, 2024

Please join us for a Holiday Party at the Monthly Review office in New York City, on Wednesday, December 11, 5:30 to 8:30 pm, at 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W, (between 6th and 7th avenues). No rsvp required.

Fred Magdoff interviewed on Mud and Water Radio

February 20, 2024

Throughout the world, multinational firms, private investors and state corporations are buying agricultural land. Fred Magdoff is the author of the recent article “21st Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession,” published in the November 2013 issue of Monthly Review. He is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He was interviewed on the radio show Mud and Water, broadcast by CKUW in Winnipeg, Canada.

Capitalist Globalization reviewed by Systemic Disorder

February 20, 2024

Corporate globalization is an international phenomenon by definition that is commonly opposed on nationalist lines. A process embedded in capitalist competition and advanced by the industrialists and financiers who directly benefit from it, however, transcends borders. Understanding corporate globalization is necessary to developing strategies to effectively counter it, and relying on nationalist arguments is a barrier to grasping the systemic nature of globalization, argues Martin Hart-Landsberg in his just released book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance and Alternatives.