Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

“A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution”: reviewed by the New West Indian Guide

February 20, 2024

Stephen Cushion’s A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution, the result of extensive archival and oral history research, is one of the most important books (in any language) on the history of the Batista regime and its opponents during the 1950s to appear in the last three or more decades. It is also an openly revisionist account that challenges much research and writing produced by both Cuban and foreign scholars….

“Wall Street’s Think Tank”–New in Paperback, with Afterword

February 20, 2024

The Council on Foreign Relations is the world’s most powerful private foreign-policy think tank and membership organization. Dominated by Wall Street, it claims among its members a high percentage of past and present top U.S. government officials as well as corporate leaders and influential figures in the fields of education, media, law, and nonprofit work. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the Council on Foreign Relations from the 1970s to the present, and this new paperback edition includes an Afterword discussing the Trump Administration and the Council….

“Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic”: Jeremy Kuzmarov via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

“The release of the Mueller report and its conclusion that President Donald J. Trump and his top aides did not collude with Russia has prompted some important critical reflection on the American media and its penchant for sensationalism….”

Spoiler alert: Capitalists will not make things better–The Progressive Populist reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

February 20, 2024

“In six chapters, Yates delivers a primer on radical economics. It is no mean feat, but he is up to it. ¶ In Chapter One, ‘The Working Class,’ Yates defines it, qualitatively and quantitatively. He refines the numbers that mainstream economists use to fog the oppressive nature of the system. ¶ Yates sketches an ‘analytical scaffolding’ of global labor, from the exploited (wages) and expropriated (theft). Yates explains how wage and unwaged labor are integral to the system, similar to the era of slave and ‘free’ workers…

Science & Society reviews Samir Amin’s “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”

February 20, 2024

In this short book Samir Amin, a distinguished left intellectual with a career spanning many decades, offers an analysis of Russia and its role in the transition from capitalism to socialism. The book consists of six essays written between 1990 and 2015, supplemented by a new commentary at the end. Amin’s approach combines the Marxist theory of historical materialism with World Systems theory….

A World to Win! reviews “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

February 20, 2024

In the 21st century, we live in a world wholly dominated by the US empire and its allies, and capitalism maintains its stranglehold on the lives of working class people across the entire globe, all the while destroying the environment, posing an existential threat not only to humanity but all life on Earth….

New! A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee

February 20, 2024

The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman—a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker—left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate—i.e., the Soviets—landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic….

Jeremy Kuzmarov: “Democrats play the Russia card … Trump wins”

February 20, 2024

The New York Times headline said it all: Mueller Finds No Trump Russia Conspiracy. ¶ After two years of investigation and $25 million in taxpayer dollars, the special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that President Donald J. Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election….

International Socialist Review thinks “India After Naxalbari” = required reading

February 20, 2024

D’Mello’s tour de force is both a history of modern India and its ‘rotten liberal democracy,’ including the left’s challenge to it, and a fine-grained look at India’s Maoist movement. It combines a sharp historical account with critical analysis, along with some original theoretical insights…

For a new post-capitalist world: ResoluteReader reviews “The Biofuels Deception”

February 20, 2024

On March 15 2019 up to 1.5 million students walked out of class to demand action in the face of looming environmental catastrophe. In the UK one of the most popular slogans was “System Change not Climate Change” reflecting the protesters’ feelings that capitalism and its politicians had failed them. As Marxist writers like John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus have shown, capitalism is at heart, a system that puts the accumulation of wealth above the general interests of people and plane