Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

The disproportionate effects of infectious diseases on racial minorities (Watch: Science for the People)

The disproportionate effects of infectious diseases on racial minorities (Watch: Science for the People)

On the first Friday in March, SftP member Joseph Graves Jr. interviewed Rob Wallace about his work Dead Epidemiologists. Grave’s expertise in epidemiology and the disproportionate effects of infectious diseases on racial minorities steered the conversation as Wallace offered his take on the relationship between industrial agriculture, capitalist modes of production and the Covid-19 crisis.

New! “Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present”

New! “Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present”

Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the pathbreaking Capital and Imperialism—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production…

1919 Direct Power: Journal of Working Class Studies reviews “Radical Seattle”

1919 Direct Power: Journal of Working Class Studies reviews “Radical Seattle”

Since the Covid-19 pandemic pummeled the economy, millions of workers have been displaced, while others continue to work amid increasingly harsh, often hazardous working conditions. With Covid forcing millions to choose between a paycheck and their health, some labor activists have hoped for a wave of wildcat strikes, and in the wake of the election, perhaps even a ‘general strike’ if Trump refused to concede….

SR 2021: Ursula Huws on “Reaping the Whirlwind,” via Marxist Education Project

SR 2021: Ursula Huws on “Reaping the Whirlwind,” via Marxist Education Project

Sunday, January 31 @ 1:30pm-4:00pm: Join this online reading group and discussion of the most recent issue of Socialist Register dedicated to Leo Panitch. This first session begins with Ursula Huws‘ essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis.” This work addresses the changes currently sweeping through global labor markets during the coronavirus pandemic….

Engels on Ecology: Against the Grain talks to John Bellamy Foster

Engels on Ecology: Against the Grain talks to John Bellamy Foster

C. S. Soong, host of Against the Grain (KPFA/94.1 FM) talks with John Bellamy Foster, author, most recently, of The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. To what extent did Frederick Engels engage with environmental and ecological issues? When Engels wrote about the dialectics of nature, what did he mean by “dialectics”? According to Foster, Engels’s insights into ecology, dialectics, and the environmental conditions of the working class were, and remain, critically important…

Spend February 14 with a book you’ll love: Socialist History Society launches “The Return of Nature” by John Bellamy Foster

Spend February 14 with a book you’ll love: Socialist History Society launches “The Return of Nature” by John Bellamy Foster

Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies….