Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Socialism and the Failures of Capitalism: Counterpunch on SR 2020’s “Beyond Market Dystopia”

February 20, 2024

To define a workable socialism, it’s best first to lay out what’s wrong with capitalism. Nancy Fraser’s excellent essay in Beyond Market Dystopia does just this, and these wrongs are three: injustice, irrationality and unfreedom. Injustice inheres in the exploitation of labor and theft of its surplus value. Irrationality exists in capitalism’s built-in economic crises. Unfreedom derives from social inequality and class power and also from tyranny in the work-place…

Erasing the crime of poverty: January Magazine reviews Seth Donnelly’s “The Lie of Global Prosperity”

February 20, 2024

“Seth Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, released in paperback late last year, is a methodical examination of how the World Bank spins its number crunching to cover up the extent of global poverty. Donnelly bolsters his analysis with on-the-ground reporting from numerous fact-finding trips to Haiti; the descriptions of what he found there effectively show how World Bank support for unjust governments plays out on the ground in underdeveloped nations…

ResoluteReader resolutely reviews “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks”

February 20, 2024

This charming account of a campaign of local people to stop Shell building a refinery and gas pipeline through the glorious coastal landscape of County Mayo in Ireland is both a rage of anger at a world were profit is put before people and planet; and a celebration of the ordinary people who stand up and protest against this….

“Passionate and entertaining account of GDR Socialism”: People’s Voice reviews “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

Thirty-one years ago the Berlin Wall came down and the working class in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, voted to merge with capitalist West Germany. In A Socialist Defector: from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee veteran journalist Victor Grossman provides insight into why the GDR’s 41-year experiment with socialism did not last. He describes the ups and downs of the former GDR, spicing it up with many interesting details of life before and after the Berlin Wall….

Whiteness and the opening of slave markets: Transmotion reviews Gerald Horne’s “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

“In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class. In this, his thirtieth book, Horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. Through a focus on English colonial projects, Horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure….

New! “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift”

February 20, 2024

In The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, departing from much previous scholarship, adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth….

Michael Heinrich: The Actuality Of Marx’s Communism

February 20, 2024

There is no doubt that communism was Karl Marx’s political goal. Nonetheless, he never published a book or an article with a clear and extensive demonstration of what communism means….

Capitalism and ecological theft: This is Hell! debriefs John Bellamy Foster on “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

A few days ago, Chuck Mertz, host of This is Hell!, a weekly radio longform political interview program emanating from Chicago, phoned John Bellamy Foster, author, with Brett Clark, of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift to discuss the many, devastating ways that “capitalism has ruined our relationship with nature.

Understanding the chains of global imperialism: Intan Suwandi visits THIS IS HELL!

February 20, 2024

Intan Suwandi, author of the recently published Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, talked to Chuck Mertz, host of the weekly radio show, THIS IS HELL!, about how individual workers in the Global South — despite the purported demise of imperialism — continue to be intricately controlled by multinationals.

Intellectual rigor + intensely engaged activism = Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

The backward and repressive nature of the 1950s in regard to rights and opportunities for women has been widely exposed, not least through cultural representations like ‘Mad Men’, Doris Day films, and every single domestic appliance or kitchen advert from that decade and beyond. Women are housewives and mothers, slim and glamorous with high heels and frilly aprons. It’s easy to laugh now at these caricatures which hid an uncomfortable and often very unhappy reality. But it would never have occurred to me that in contrast to the life of a 1950s housewife, a bright and highly intelligent young girl would choose, in preference to that fate, to become a nun. But so was the case with Helena Sheehan, born into 1940s USA.