Category: Monthly Review Press /

Read an excerpt from In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself on UTNE Reader Online

February 20, 2024

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, New York, on Long Island, and moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was not quite four years old. Like many children from working-class families (his father was, at various times, a farmer, carpenter, and house builder), Whitman left school before he turned twelve. He worked as an office boy, and at age thirteen he was apprenticed to a printer. In his late teens and early twenties, he taught school in various Long Island small towns. There he made his first tentative steps into journalism and Democratic Party politics.

NEW! In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself by John Marsh

February 20, 2024

Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman's life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

Reconstructing Lenin reviewed by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

February 20, 2024

With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, and the seeming defeat of "Marxism-Leninism" in 1991, it appeared we could at last bury Lenin. And certainly, who will mourn for the death of a Lenin encased in granite monuments with his words turned into a dogmatic religion to legitimise the Eastern Bloc regimes? However, there is another Lenin who remains very much alive. This Lenin has been unearthed in recent years with the "Lenin renaissance". Different scholars and political activists such as Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Anderson, to name just a few have explored what remains very much alive in Lenin. While they don't necessarily agree on all their conclusions, all of them have challenged Soviet-era mythology and anti-communist historiography by revealing the Lenin who fused a creative and dynamic Marxist theory to develop a revolutionary political practice to change the world.

Jan 23: Steve Early on Social Movement Unionism at UC Santa Cruz

February 20, 2024

Join Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress for a panel discussion on Social Movement Unionism, with Mike Rotkin and Amanda Reyes. Friday Jan. 23, 1pm to 3pm, in the Redwood Lounge (across from the Baytree Bookstore), Quarry Plaza, 2nd Fl., University of California, Santa Cruz.

From Solidarity to Sellout reviewed in Science & Society

February 20, 2024

Critical insider examinations in English of the actual process of restoring capitalism from the "really existing" East European socialist economies are too rare. We have hindsight on the consequences of that restoration in several specific areas as, for example, on the weakness of their trade unions, and theoretical work by Janos Kornai and others. But now we have a genuine "insider" analysis by the prominent Polish political economist Tadeuz Kowalik (1926–2012) of how in his country an old economic system was created from the ashes of the new.

Silvertown reviewed in The Spokesman

February 20, 2024

This is a detailed book written by an academic who not only knows his subject and how to gather his research in a coherent way, but who also writes with an empathy and clear grasp of the desperations of these supposedly ordinary people who determined to take on a multinational British-based company at the centre of the British Empire and its establishment.

February: John Tully discusses Silvertown in Australia

February 20, 2024

Join John Tully, author of Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement, for two upcoming book talks in Australia on February 10 in Melbourne and February 26 in Sydney.

Yanis Varoufakis, MR author, named SYRIZA Finance Minister in Greece

February 20, 2024

On January 25, 2015, the left-wing party, SYRIZA, won a stunning victory in Greece's national elections. The new government, which says it intends to end the debilitating austerity measures forced upon Greece by the European Union, announced that the new Finance Minister is Yanis Varoufakis, a noted economist and good friend of Monthly Review (and MR author). We wish him well and trust that, unlike most economists, he will put his superb skills to work on behalf of the long-suffering Greek people and, indeed, all those oppressed by the policies imposed by the ruling classes of the European Union and United States.