In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
Barrett has always been close to the hearts of Paraguayan radicals, who, along with his progeny, have kept his memory alive. And he is known throughout the Southern Cone of South America, though his work has suffered long periods of relative neglect there. However, there has been a resurgence of interest in his life and work. We hope that with the publication of this first English translation of his major work, which includes his powerful set of essays The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests, the life and works of Rafael Barrett will inspire readers in the English-speaking world. | more…
Despite the explicitly national flavor of its title, the core themes that run through ‘Paraguayan Sorrow’ resonate broadly in space and time. No doubt thanks to his international education and background, Barrett was able to quote, compare, and draw inspiration from writers and case studies from around the world…. | more…
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and
One of the titles Fitzgerald gave to his novel—he was never satisfied with any of them—was ‘Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.’ The title juxtaposes landscape (ash heaps) and humans (millionaires), and its preposition, Among, implies a shared world, one that includes both setting and character. And so it is. Or was. Until the city turned to its master builder to clean up the mess—a master builder whose reading of ‘The Great Gatsby’ would inspire him to redeem the wasteland. | more…
The dialectics of ecology can help us move beyond critique and start developing a socialist ecological politics appropriate for the Anthropocene. This is all the more important because, contrary to some recent interpretations, Marx’s writing does not on its own give us practical solutions to the ecological contradictions of our time. Instead, we are now faced with “two opposing tendencies” with different prescriptions for how to respond to the global ecological crisis. On the one hand, some are proposing the “acceleration of capital through the financialization of nature” – a proposal that “can only lead to total disaster, the barren negation of humanity itself”. On the other hand, we find two alternative socialist projects – the idea of ecological civilisation coming from China, and the strategy of planned degrowth in rich economies. These two socialist projects will eventually have to converge, according to Foster, but how they do so remains to be seen… | more…
A year later, I still hear the explosion in my dreams. I still wake up in a cold sweat, reaching out to make sure my son is breathing beside me. The physical scars have mostly healed, but the emotional ones remain as fresh as the day it happened. People tell me I should be grateful we survived, and I am. But survival isn’t the same as living… | more…
….and the “normal” body, if you want to use that term, is the one which can keep up with the productivity of machinery, of factory life. And what Marx argued in fact was that in most cases, the productivity of machinery could outpace that of the ‘normal’ body, if you want to put it that way…” | more…
Excerpted from:
CHAPTER 8: Healthcare under Capitalism
Fundamental to the Marxist method is dialectics, with change understood as emerging from the interaction between objects and phenomena. The health status of any individual arises from the dialectical interaction between the materialism of their body and the materialism of the social context within which the body is situated. The body has its own biological structural organization, governed by its own internal biological forces. Without doubt there exists an expected way in which the body functions, reflecting its inherent structural operation, which,
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
In Yabebyry, where Barrett has gone from clandestine fugitive to a symbol of pride, hopes are high that his writing can also help lead to a new future. “Rafael Barrett planted a seed here,” said Esquivel Romero. “I’m convinced that through these efforts we’ll see our young people being more prominent, defending themselves, and defending the rights of the community and its people.” | more…
The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict. | more…
The author’s premise is that the state and capitalism dovetail to exploit people and Mother Nature for profit, a contradiction humanity must overcome to build a sustainable society. This is a systemic dilemma pushing humanity and the ecology to the brink. Transcending capitalism means transcendence of the state with people actively involved, a premise that Mészáros develops at a level of abstraction some readers might find challenging. My advice is to stick with it. I think the effort will reap intellectual and practical rewards. | more…
