Monthly Review Press

“A little Trot”: Socialist Review looks at Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

“A little Trot”: Socialist Review looks at Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

One point to make about Helena Sheehan’s political odyssey—from a conservative Catholic upbringing, through the radicalism of the US left in the 1960s and early 70s, on to Official Sinn Fein and the Communist Party of Ireland, and then into the Irish Labour Party—is that it demonstrates the importance of the theory of state capitalism for revolutionary politics….

New! “Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism”

New! “Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism”

Winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy – Paul A. Baran Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains—vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals—Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx’s own theory of exploitation.

How Jazz Survived White Supremacy: Gerald Horne talks to Truthout about “Jazz and Justice”

How Jazz Survived White Supremacy: Gerald Horne talks to Truthout about “Jazz and Justice”

Certainly, being a ‘jazz’ musician in the first decades of the 20th century was probably the most dangerous profession in the arts and, along with coal mining, one of the most dangerous jobs of all. Inhaling cigarette smoke in dank clubs, being plied with alcohol and other controlled substances by unscrupulous bosses of clubs and record labels alike, being attacked violently by racist ‘fans’

Ian Angus on the Politics of Ecosocialism, via REBEL

Ian Angus on the Politics of Ecosocialism, via REBEL

Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about capitalism’s destruction of the natural world, including river and urban pollution, and the degradation of the soil that all life depends on. For them, the word ‘socialism’ included those concerns and the need to overcome them. But in the 20th Century, most socialist organisations treated such matters as secondary…