Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Robin Morgan talks with Stephanie Urdang about what’s going on in South Africa

February 20, 2024

Robin Morgan, poet, author, and political theorist, hosts a weekly, hour-long, nationally syndicated radio show based at the Women’s Media Center. On May 12, she talked with Stephanie J. Urdang, South African journalist, activist, and author of Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa, about the recent election and 25th anniversary of South African liberation.

Ronnie Kasrils on South Africa and Palestine, comparing one apartheid to another…

February 20, 2024

Ronnie Kasrils, South African anti-apartheid activist, former South African Minister for Intelligence Services, and author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, appears on RT to talk with Afshin Rattansi, host of Going Underground, about current South African life, the ANC, and how, regarding the current Palestinian struggle, one apartheid compares to another…

Counterfire reviews “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism” along with “Climate Leviathan”

February 20, 2024

The two works considered here take on very different aspects of the general environmental crisis we face. In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright consider the political consequences of a continued failure to prevent catastrophic climate change, whereas Holt-Giménez’s Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism considers the food system’s role in and distortion by capitalism. This difference in approach makes it all the more notable that both start from the assumption that on their particular issue, the Left has failed…

“What the f… and get back to work!”–The Stansbury Forum considers Michael Yates’s new book

February 20, 2024

The book’s title poses a daunting question: Can the Working Class Change the World? Then, in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages, it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we pored over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction….

“One of the great organic intellectuals of our time”–Countercurrents reviews Samir Amin’s “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

Only People Make Their Own History is the first ever posthumous publication of Amin’s work. It includes ten of Amin’s most important essays published in the 21st century, and an introduction by renowned Marxist literary critic, Aijaz Ahmad….

In the Face of the Present Danger: Marx & Philosophy reviews “The Syriza Wave”

February 20, 2024

The book by the philosopher Helena Sheehan follows by and large the typical structure of Greek tragedy. Sheehan analyses the five key years (from 2012 to 2016) and faces of Syriza from the period of counter-hegemonic movement showing Syriza preparing to catch power and giving voice to a society of anger…

Nothing Green about Bio-Energy: the Real Democracy Movement reviews “The Biofuels Deception”

February 20, 2024

The story of bio-fuels is a moral tale of how marketised, profit-driven responses to climate change will both fail to solve the problem and cause unconsidered damaging outcomes…. ¶ In The Biofuels Deception,Okbazghi Yohannes traces the industry’s beginnings back to the Bush administration and the idea that the world was reaching ‘peak oil’….

Zillah Eisenstein: New Feminisms in the Chaos

February 20, 2024

Recently, Zillah Eisenstein, author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution–forthcoming in May–delivered an address titled “Personal and Political Feminisms: Finding Understandings Amid the Chaos.”

Zillah Eisenstein and the need to understand white supremacy, capitalism, and misogyny simultaneously

February 20, 2024

Recently, Zillah Eisenstein, author of the forthcoming Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, was interviewed by phone on Berkeley, CA radio KPFA, 94.1FM by Lisa Dettmer, host of the Women’s Magazine.

New! By Samir Amin: “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

Radical political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential. Monthly Review Press is honored to publish this volume, culled from the Monthly Review magazine, of ten of Samir Amin’s most significant essays written in the twenty-first century. …