Monthly Review Press

Clarity of ideas and political method: Resolute Reader looks at “The Robbery of Nature”

Clarity of ideas and political method: Resolute Reader looks at “The Robbery of Nature”

Over the last few decades John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have been at the forefront of showing how classical Marxism is the foremost tool in explaining capitalism’s rift with the ecological systems that support our society. They have shown how Karl Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ explains how capitalism is a break with other historical modes of production, a break that has transformed our relationship to the natural world and then broken the ongoing metabolism between humans and the planet. Reading this book while trapped at home during the Covid-19 pandemic it is very easy to see the practical application of Marx’s metabolic rift theory….

How capitalism interlocks with imperialism: Counterfire reviews Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

How capitalism interlocks with imperialism: Counterfire reviews Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism…

When Solidarity Mattered: CounterPunch considers “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

When Solidarity Mattered: CounterPunch considers “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

This is a special book, bearing an almost sacred topic for all those interested in the history of the American labor and the Left. The vibrant, pre-1920 Socialist Party, waxing strong and confident until struck down for its resistance to the US entry into the First World War, stood for a larger and more diverse radicalism. including Wobblies, quasi-wobblies. labor and cultural radicals of no certain description and of several generations. They had in common the sense that dramatic change in society was possible, perhaps inevitable….

The 15-year rising: Truthout reviews Fred Wilcox’s “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks”

The 15-year rising: Truthout reviews Fred Wilcox’s “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks”

Fighting fossil fuel companies can be dangerous business. The people of County Mayo, Ireland, found that out when they rose up against Shell Oil in the early 2000s. The uprising lasted 15 years. Protesters were beaten and jailed. But they delayed the refinery’s opening by 10 years, cost Shell billions of dollars and caused the company a public relations nightmare, as a new book by Fred Wilcox, Shamrocks and Oil Slicks, recounts….

Delusions of the American Revolution: Science & Society looks at “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

Delusions of the American Revolution: Science & Society looks at “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

In this comprehensive study of the connections among capitalism, slavery and white supremacy, Gerald Horne, the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of more than 30 scholarly books, takes a deep dive into the 17th century, revealing fallacies in what later ages have said about the earlier ones, showing the slow and steady consolidation of axes of differentiation in the service of capital, and ultimately connecting the choice in 2016 of “a vulgar billionaire” with the cross-class coalition that originated in the colonial settlements of the New World….

COVID-19 Does Discriminate: Gerald Horne discusses how the virus “rips the mask off US society”

COVID-19 Does Discriminate: Gerald Horne discusses how the virus “rips the mask off US society”

Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair, from community radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, talks to Dr. Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author—whose book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse, is forthcoming this July. In their conversation, Horne explores the assertion that the arrival of COVID-19 has exposed inequities in our social system and continues to act as a catalyst for deep and simmering social and economic crises—all worsened by the current political system….