Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

NEW! “The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States”

February 20, 2024

“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites….

Not afraid to challenge “facts” about Marx’s life: Socialist Review on “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked….

“Setting the record straight”–The Real Democracy Movement reviews “Jazz & Justice”

February 20, 2024

Jazz is enjoying a new wave of popularity. A gig by Kamasi Washington, the last musician named in Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice, attracts big crowds, and his recordings make big sales…

Progressive Populist + SocialistAction = 2 reviews of “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism”

February 20, 2024

“Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads…”
¶ “The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…”

Gerald Horne: Africans See China as Counterweight to US and Europe

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, author of Jazz and Justice and the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse, recently talked to Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, on Black Agenda Radio, about how Africa, in contrast to the United States, tends to see China’s role in geopolitics…

From the Square: Michael Joseph Roberto talks about “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

February 20, 2024

The alt-right is on the move everywhere. Ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists, religious fanatics and other retrograde political elements–all are rising steadily from the ranks of societies across the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia. Inflicting hatred and violence on their respective populations, its constituents target all who seek to expand human rights… In short, what the alt-right seeks is a world ruled by those who are opposed to the progress of humanity itself….

“Carefully crafted and surprising book”: People & Nature reviews Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Kohei Saito’s book shows us how Karl Marx evolved as an ecological thinker. It is a pioneering scrutiny of the evolution of ideas, the genealogy of terms, lines of debates and kinds of evidence, from the 1840s to about 1870. The book started as a German doctoral thesis, grounded in hitherto unpublished notebooks by Marx, but also drawing on Saito’s wide erudition. Putting paid to one set of debates, the book generates new ones…

Regarding ecological imperialism–Freedom Socialist reviews “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Saito delves deeply into Marx’s notebooks, the first to do so. He shows, time and again, that Marx was deeply aware of the unsustainable attack by capitalism upon the land itself. ¶ I have had a gut feeling about that since I first read Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels in my teens: that alienation from the land is a key underpinning of capitalism….

“All my life, all my strength”–Samir Amin’s “Long Revolution” reviewed by Marx & Philosophy

February 20, 2024

Samir Amin, who was a leading Marxist analyst of African underdevelopment, capitalism and globalisation, passed away in August 2018. The Long Revolution of the Global South is the second volume of his memoirs and was published in English in 2019. The book provides fascinating insight into Amin’s take on global events and the role he played in various initiatives to confront the grotesque levels of inequality engendered by global capitalism….

New! “Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living”

February 20, 2024

How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living….