Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

“A lofty dream” (Work Work Work reviewed in ‘Dissident Voice’ and ‘Countercurrents’)

“A lofty dream” (Work Work Work reviewed in ‘Dissident Voice’ and ‘Countercurrents’)

February 20, 2024

‘Work Work Work’ sounds similar for working boys in many countries. Anyone can find them at any hub of exploitation and profit making. A visit to the Tipu Sultan Road or the Dolaai Khaal or Taatee Bazaar area in the capital city of Dhaka, a visit to automobile repair shops around Dhaka or to the marine vessel making yards along the Buriganga near Dhaka will find them. Boys picking torn papers, discarded plastic pieces of innumerable shapes and sizes from street sides, tearing down old posters from walls of the city buildings, looking for whatever is saleable in garbage heaps, selling kitchen items or flowers from morning to night, until may be 10 or 11 PM….

An invaluable warning against the State as a neutral tool (Beyond Leviathian reviewed by ‘Counterfire’)

February 20, 2024

The state cannot be ‘reformed’ since it is not, despite what liberal theory would insist, a neutral institution. The state historically developed in order to enshrine class power, and so traps us ‘within the paralyzing confines of the hierarchical and antagonistic framework of the political/military domain’. This can only be broken through a ‘radical transformation’ in ‘our social metabolism’, that is in the relations of production of capitalism.

“So much drama, infighting, passion” (Radek: A Novel reviewed during #Germanlitmonth)

February 20, 2024

Admittedly he was Lenin’s man rather than Stalin’s. He was a passenger on Lenin’s famous sealed train. He made the mistake, however, of aligning himself for ideological reasons with Trotsky after Lenin died, a decision he never really recovered from. I got the impression, from Heym’s telling, that Stalin played cat to Radek’s mouse ever afterward.

Listen: “Haiti, Past, Present and Future” (Gerald Horne on

Listen: “Haiti, Past, Present and Future” (Gerald Horne on the ‘De Facto Podcast’)

February 20, 2024

Through his characteristic style of global analysis, Horne’s analysis provides a historical and political cross-hatching between the Haitian Revolution and events taking place on the mainland often considered wholly unconnected therefrom, bringing the international implications of the Revolution into relief, and chronicling its seismic impact as the epicenter of universal emancipation against the tides of American counter-revolution.

A chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy (Washington’s New Cold War reviewed by ‘Morning Star’)

A chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy (Washington’s New Cold War reviewed by ‘Morning Star’)

February 20, 2024

‘John Bellamy Foster’s contribution, “Notes on Extremism for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements,” is a chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy. Carefully, he explains the shift in strategic thinking inside US governing circles. In the period before the end of the first cold war, the consensus was that the relative balance in nuclear weaponry meant that the US could not guarantee a victory in a nuclear war with the USSR…. In this context we can understand the eastward expansion of NATO from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden; the Maidan coup and promotion of an anti-Russian government in Ukraine; and the refusal to offer Russia security guarantees last year or peace negotiations this year.’

Markets and tech won’t solve climate emergency… (Foster interviewed for “Truthout”)

Markets and tech won’t solve climate emergency… (Foster interviewed for “Truthout”)

February 20, 2024

as many have observed, for many people it’s easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Foster’s book tells us that we have a choice: “ruin or revolution.” The reason for the necessity of revolution is that tinkering won’t solve our problems. Technocratic fixes won’t save the Earth as a place fit for human habitation. The problem, as he told me in the interview that follows, is systemic….

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