Monthly Review Press

“A left-wing memoir to treasure”–Twentieth Century Communism reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

“A left-wing memoir to treasure”–Twentieth Century Communism reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Much of the interest in Sheehan’s life-story has concentrated upon her journey from being a young nun in Philadelphia in the early 1960s to her joining the ‘Official’ IRA and subsequently the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in the 1970s. Her own text, Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun(published in the mid-1990s), has helped to focus readers’ attention upon this unusual trajectory.

“More liberty than bourgeois society can reach”: Socialism & Democracy reviews “Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell”

“More liberty than bourgeois society can reach”: Socialism & Democracy reviews “Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell”

February 20, 2024

Ever since he died fighting for the Republican cause in Spain in February 1937, there has been a recurring critical debate about the work of Christopher Caudwell. Indeed, between 1950 and 1951 there was what came to be known as ‘the Caudwell controversy’ where leading members of the British Communist Party, of which Caudwell was a member, debated in the pages of The Modern Quarterly whether Caudwell was really an orthodox Marxist or just a bourgeois idealist….

Progressive Populist + SocialistAction = 2 reviews of “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism”

Progressive Populist + SocialistAction = 2 reviews of “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism”

February 20, 2024

“Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads…”
¶ “The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…”

NEW! “The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States”

NEW! “The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States”

February 20, 2024

“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites….

Regarding ecological imperialism–Freedom Socialist reviews “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

Regarding ecological imperialism–Freedom Socialist reviews “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Saito delves deeply into Marx’s notebooks, the first to do so. He shows, time and again, that Marx was deeply aware of the unsustainable attack by capitalism upon the land itself. ¶ I have had a gut feeling about that since I first read Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels in my teens: that alienation from the land is a key underpinning of capitalism….

New! “Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living”

New! “Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living”

February 20, 2024

How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living….

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

February 20, 2024

That capitalist medicine prioritises the generation of surplus value over the health of populations should be obvious to any critical student or scholar in the field, but where Waitzkin and colleagues depart from this basic assumption is in demonstrating the political economy of health in the current phase of neoliberalism where, for example, the processes of financialization have eclipsed material production….

Newsletter sign-up

Keep up to date with all the latest socialist news from MR