Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

New! The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? by John Marciano

February 20, 2024

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years—through November 11, 2025—commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 3 million Vietnamese—soldiers, parents, grandparents, children—also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated.

Building alternatives to neoliberalism in Latin America: Links interviews Michael Lebowitz

February 20, 2024

Michael A. Lebowitz is the author of Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted, and The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now. He was recently in Australia for the Socialism in the 21st Century conference, which was co-hosted by Links. In this interview, Lebowitz covers some of the topics he discussed during his visit regarding the opposition to neoliberalism and the prospects for a socialist alternative in Latin America today.

New! Big Farms Make Big Flu — Catch it now!

February 20, 2024

In this collection of dispatches, by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Rob Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. With a precise and radical wit, Wallace juxtaposes ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens with microbial time travel and neoliberal Ebola. While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace’s collection is the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science into a new understanding of infections.

On Radical Leisure: Eva Swidler interviewed by This Is Hell!

February 20, 2024

Social historian Eva Swidler, author of the June Monthly Review article, “Radical Leisure,” explores the radical potential of work resistance, explains how the labor movement of the 20th century traded the promise of less working hours for slightly more wages, and makes the case for collective action and working class solidarity as the only way individuals can reclaim their limited time from the unlimited demands of capitalism. On This is Hell: a weekly Chicago longform political interview program broadcast on WNUR.

Imperialism in the 21st Century reviewed by The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis 384 pp, $28 pbk, ISBN 9781583675779 By John Smith Reviewed by Seth Sandronsky “Why are hundreds of millions of… READ MORE

Facing the Anthropocene reviewed by ResoluteReader

February 20, 2024

It seems that on an almost daily basis we read reports that climate change is getting worse, faster than expected. Only a few months back in the aftermath of the Paris climate talks in December 2015, politicians were hailing the successes of the negotiations. They claimed it was a major step forward. Yet little concrete action has taken place, and many of those who protested and called for serious action from the politicians, will be asking ‘what has changed?

“The Violence of Forgetting”: Henry Giroux interviewed by Brad Evans for the New York Times

February 20, 2024

This interview is part of the The Stone, a New York Times online forum for contemporary philosophers and critical theorists. It is the fifth in a series of dialogues on violence…. READ MORE

A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution reviewed in E-International Relations

February 20, 2024

Drawing on exceptionally rare, difficult-to-access collections of underground publications, pamphlets, and oral testimonies—more difficult to access that the author admits—Cushion pushes back against several traditions of argumentation that have tended to cast labor struggle in the 1950s to the historiographical margins. Importantly, these lacunae in explaining the Cuban Revolution’s origins have remained equally persistent among Cuban and non-Cuban historians, the Revolution’s admirers and its fiercest critics.

Marciano: Steven Spielberg to direct another fantasy; this one about Walter Cronkite & the Vietnam War

February 20, 2024

The word out of Hollywood is that Steven Spielberg plans to direct a film about famed television commentator Walter Cronkite. According to Variety, it will highlight Cronkite’s protest against the War in Vietnam—especially ‘the role that he played in turning public opinion against the increasingly un-winnable conflict.’ So goes the myth. In reality, Cronkite never opposed the war itself; rather, he only came to question it after the Tet Offensive made it clear that the U.S. policy in Vietnam was not working.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed in Radical Philosophy

February 20, 2024

Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age 208 pp, $19 pbk, ISBN 9781583674635 By Ursula Huws Reviewed by Elinor Taylor “When will work be over? This… READ MORE