November 1, 2025
Paul Buhle reviews Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, a new biography of the seminal—yet previously lesser known—activist and journalist, Hubert Harrison. Through this new intellectual and cultural study of Harrison's remarkable life and work, Buhle writes, author Brian Kwoba tells a story of a man ahead of his time in challenging white supremacy and capitalism through Black radical thought.
October 1, 2025
Paul Buhle reviews two books by renowned leftist Tariq Ali. In these two texts, Buhle writes, one can read and discern a history of the UK left. Through Ali's autobiography, Buhle writes, readers can experience the ups and downs of various factions, from the Labour Party to Trotskyist journals; through his memoirs, we get a sense of Ali's deep insights, drawn from his extensive travels and a life deeply embedded in history.
January 1, 2025
This month, we at MR had the great pleasure of publishing this note on Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation, written by Dylan Davis and Paul Buhle, with illustrations from the book by illustrator Paul Peart-Smith.
December 1, 2024
In this review of Andrew Drummond's The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer (Verso Books, 2024), Paul Buhle explores how the influence of this Christian priest reverberated throughout the centuries, inspiring generations of future revolutionaries—including Karl Marx himself.
January 1, 2024
In this review of Linda Dittmar's Tracing Homelands, Paul Buhle writes, "History may yet hold hope when hope is otherwise lacking when we reject the stalemate that only leads to despair."
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December 1, 2020
Both Toni Gilpin's The Long Deep Grudge and Michael Goldfield's The Southern Key offer ample evidence that the grand era of U.S. labor history scholarship is not yet past. The Long Deep Grudge is in equal parts labor history and family reminiscence as Gilpin seeks the fuller story of her father, who played a leadership role in the United Auto Workers union. The Southern Key is in many ways a study of a different variety, but very much of a similarly militant kind. Goldfield, a labor activist veteran himself, draws the big picture of what he sees as the central failure of the U.S. left: the failure to organize the South.
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June 1, 2018
Instead of theory, early U.S. radicals excelled in reportage, like John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, or fiction, like Upton Sinclair's packing-house shocker The Jungle. To Europeans American thought seemed impermeable to the difficult ideas of Marxism. That changed with the founding of Monthly Review in 1949, which marked a newly realized if not entirely new trend in American Marxist thought.
�February 1, 2015
Chris Bambery's splendid People's History builds upon the scholarly work of others across several generations…. In Bambery's careful telling, the decisive moment in anything like modern Scottish history comes several hundred years ago. The Scots' real capitalism spread through the savage process of depopulation that Marx described so brilliantly in Capital: enclosure. Over extended decades, thousands of historic villages were literally emptied, so much so that remnants of crude huts can still be found in areas that have fewer inhabitants than sheep. The distinct language, created over thousands of years and retained with great effort in Wales, and with less effort in the rural districts of Ireland, did not need to be crudely suppressed here: the victims, pushed into the cities when not driven to early deaths, seem to have lost everything in this later period but their colorful, characteristic Scottish accents.
�October 1, 2014
It is surely difficult for young people today to grasp that thirty years or so ago, radical historian-activist Edward Thompson was by opinion polls intermittently the second or third most popular person in England, just after the Queen Mother. This was despite the British establishment, to say nothing of U.S. Cold Warriors (liberal or conservative), slandering him for decades—and why not? He had led massive protest movements of ordinary people against their government. Worse, in cloistered academic quarters he was viewed as having reorganized the whole idea of social history and turned it over to ordinary people! More than anyone else in the English-speaking world, he made the history of such people important.
�January 1, 2014
Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali sets the tone in his introduction to The Poorer Nations, arguing that the moment has arrived for scholars from the underdeveloped world of plundered resources and impoverished people to make the necessary statements themselves, rather than leaving that work to the first world left. Boutros-Ghali makes one other important point: that Prashad is hard at work rediscovering the hopes of earlier decades, the moment of anti-colonialist hopes, of common feeling among various nationalities and nations freeing themselves and looking forward to a kind of communitarian developmental process that was, often enough, called "socialism."
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