Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

What the Fall of the Wall Really Meant: Workers World reviews Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

What the Fall of the Wall Really Meant: Workers World reviews Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

This Nov. 9, the world’s imperialists and big capitalists will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will fill the media, all too available to them, with lies claiming this event was a victory for democracy and freedom. They will be slandering the German Democratic Republic and all the good and progressive acts of the once-socialist part of Germany…

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

That capitalist medicine prioritises the generation of surplus value over the health of populations should be obvious to any critical student or scholar in the field, but where Waitzkin and colleagues depart from this basic assumption is in demonstrating the political economy of health in the current phase of neoliberalism where, for example, the processes of financialization have eclipsed material production….

“If Not Now, When? Finding a feminism for 2020”–Zillah Eisenstein via NYU Press

“If Not Now, When? Finding a feminism for 2020”–Zillah Eisenstein via NYU Press

I ask us all to think as imaginatively as possible in these next several months before the first primaries. I see these current thoughts as a continuance of the challenge thrown out by me in my recent book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, to think boldly about how we find the newest anti-racist feminisms that can mobilize for the 2020 election and beyond.

“A left-wing memoir to treasure”–Twentieth Century Communism reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

“A left-wing memoir to treasure”–Twentieth Century Communism reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

Much of the interest in Sheehan’s life-story has concentrated upon her journey from being a young nun in Philadelphia in the early 1960s to her joining the ‘Official’ IRA and subsequently the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in the 1970s. Her own text, Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun(published in the mid-1990s), has helped to focus readers’ attention upon this unusual trajectory.

“More liberty than bourgeois society can reach”: Socialism & Democracy reviews “Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell”

“More liberty than bourgeois society can reach”: Socialism & Democracy reviews “Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell”

Ever since he died fighting for the Republican cause in Spain in February 1937, there has been a recurring critical debate about the work of Christopher Caudwell. Indeed, between 1950 and 1951 there was what came to be known as ‘the Caudwell controversy’ where leading members of the British Communist Party, of which Caudwell was a member, debated in the pages of The Modern Quarterly whether Caudwell was really an orthodox Marxist or just a bourgeois idealist….

Zillah Eisenstein: feminism, socialism, and the imperative of confronting white supremacy, via Out of Bounds

Zillah Eisenstein: feminism, socialism, and the imperative of confronting white supremacy, via Out of Bounds

Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of political theory at Ithaca College and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently talked with Tish Perlman, host of Out of Bounds, a weekly radio show focusing on people living, working, and thinking outside the mainstream. In this interview, Zillah discusses the necessity to abolish pervasive white supremacy, her Communist upbringing, and how we should all just shut up about Trump…