Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Socialist Review looks at “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

February 20, 2024

Michael D Yates, author of Why Unions Matter (1998), dedicated most of his academic and professional career to studying labour and social movements in the US. Through his latest work, Yates contends that the working class must change the world or humanity will succumb to the barbarity of capitalism. His warning must be taken seriously because we live in a world prone to wars and global economic crises, among other evils…

“A Progressive US Policy Must Extend Beyond Open Borders”: David L. Wilson via Truthout

February 20, 2024

It would certainly seem natural for leftists to support the right to migrate. After all, the socialist movement’s historic slogan has been ‘Workers of all lands unite,’ and its anthem is ‘The Internationale.’ But in the past few years, a number of people on the left have come out against the concept….

The fiction that the light is “white”: on Gerald Horne’s “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

Political analysis, alas, is no less immune to what has been called the ‘fashion system’ than any other segment of human consumption habits since the end of the Great War bequeathed the industrial form of indoctrination that prevails—now in digital form—today…. Yet the misery to which the vast majority of humanity is subjected has been altered only minimally since 1492 gave the Roman Catholic and later Protestant elites in Europe the impetus to seize the rest of the planet, dominating the world’s population and the rest of nature…

A Leftist Rejoinder to the “Capitalist Miracle”–Counterpunch reviews Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

Arriving on a book tour for his newly published “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee” on April 23rd, Victor Grossman is a testament to Bertolt Brecht’s oft-quoted lyrics. At the age of 91, he has never ceded an inch to capitalism and imperialism….

Michael Yates talks to David Barsamian on Alternative Radio

February 20, 2024

Warren Buffett, the much-admired genius investor and one of the world’s richest men said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ And who are the losers? The working class, people who work for an hourly wage or are salaried…. Can the working class, long taken for granted by the Democratic Party, be a force for positive progressive change? How might it overcome its own internal divisions and contradictions?

Via TRNN: Jeb Sprague delivers background on Caribbean crises: growing sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela

February 20, 2024

Jeb Sprague, author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti has appeared twice recently on The Real News Network, talking about current events in the Caribbean, and focusing on the Trump administration’s new aggressive policies toward Cuba and its attempts to divide CARICOM.

Capitalism Is Choking Professionalism in Medicine: Medscape’s take on “Health Care Under the Knife”

February 20, 2024

Health Care Under the Knife, composed of 13 incisive chapters by 16 distinguished authors, addresses the gross inequities, blaming capitalism-run-amok as the root cause….

Jebb Sprague: “Washington’s hybrid war on Venezuela – a 21st-century attempt at regime change”

February 20, 2024

Rather than carry out conventional war, over recent months US officials have sought to promote internal divisions, sabotage, and economic collapse within Venezuela. Here’s the full story of Washington’s hybrid war on the country….

No workers’ paradise, but the GDR wasn’t a prison, either: novelist Eve Ottenberg reviews “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

From the perspective of 2019, it’s often difficult to recall the cold war hysteria over East Germany. It was called a secret police state. Everyone there was said to be oppressively monitored if not actively harassed by the Stasi. For Americans, it epitomized communist tyranny. Then along comes Victor Grossman’s memoir, A Socialist Defector–he fled US anticommunism to East Germany in 1952–and the distortions about East Germany (GDR) go right out the window…

“National Liberation in an International Context”–Counterpunch on “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

As autobiography, Navigating the Zeitgeist is a fascinating account of events and personalities with whom Sheehan was deeply involved….