Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Revolutions Have Brought Disappointment–But Hope Remains: Stephanie Urdang on Southern Africa

February 20, 2024

When I immigrated to the United States from South Africa towards the end of the 1960’s I was totally unaware of the wars of liberation against Portuguese colonialism that had begun in the early 1960’s in the neighboring countries of Mozambique and Angola. All I knew about Mozambique was the reputation of its capital, Lourenço Marques, as a cosmopolitan Portuguese-style city where white South Africans went on holiday….

Science & Society reviews Kohei Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Amid the rising tide of books on Marx and ecology, this book stands out. Much of this work has been about whether Marx’s analysis of capitalism was a blind commitment to industrial society that has ignored natural circumstances and ecological crisis. Kohei Saito brings Marx’s ecological notebooks into the debate, rediscovers Marx’s environmental concerns and their relevance to the critique of political economy, and reinforces the argument that Marx saw environmental crisis embedded in capitalism….

Green Left Weekly reviews Samir Amin’s “Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value”

February 20, 2024

Amin, former director of the Third World Forum in Senegal, was renowned as one of the most significant theorists in the field of global economics, uneven development and imperialism. His work is a major reference point in explaining the origin and nature of the North/South divide….

Russian-bashing is nothing new: The Palestine Chronicle looks at “The Russians Are Coming, Again”

February 20, 2024

The mainstream media continues to harvest all the disinformation it can concerning the relationship between Trump and Putin and the character of Putin himself, not to mention the overall generalizations about the state of Russia and the kind of people Russians are. …

“George Orwell said the world’s bureaucrats couldn’t take spring from us, but they are”–The Guardian and John Bellamy Foster on Climate Change

February 20, 2024

As the sociologist John Bellamy Foster noted back in 2002, Orwell’s beloved toads are now vanishingly rare, with some 200 different species of amphibians driven to extinction in the last few decades…

The Progressive Populist reviews Michael Tigar’s “Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power”

February 20, 2024

Myths that enhance private and state power are blooming in the current political moment. Take President Trump’s case for a ‘national emergency’ at the Mexico-US border. ¶ There is a history here. Author Michael E. Tigar unpacks it, though sparing ink on the 45th president…

“From Marx to Ecosocialism”–Michael Löwy on new books by Kohei Saito and Victor Wallis

February 20, 2024

There is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking. Some Marxist journals, such as Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Monthly Review and Socialism and Democracy have been playing an important role in this process, which is becoming increasingly influential. The two books discussed here—very different in style content and purpose—are part of this “Red and Green” upsurge….

The Future Cannot Be Capitalist: Michael Yates talks about the Working Class on Radio WFHB

February 20, 2024

With Covington Catholic High School students offering a fresh example of the embodied ideologies of capitalism–like racism, patriarchy, and ecological destruction–we turn to theories of working-class solidarity….

American-Brand Fascism: Michael Joseph Roberto on NC Public Radio

February 20, 2024

Michael Joseph Roberto, author of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940, talks to Frank Stasio, host of The State of Things, about American-made fascism and what may happen, now that “American empire is on its last legs…

UK’s Communist Review Faces Ian Angus’s Anthropocene

February 20, 2024

In October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that carbon emissions must be cut to zero by 2050, in order to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.1 The current British (non-binding) target for 2050 is an 80% cut. …