Category: Monthly Review Press /

NEW! Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, edited by Clairmont Chung

February 20, 2024

This book presents a moving and insightful portrait of the great scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney through the words of academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew him intimately or felt his influence. These informal recollections and reflections demonstrate why Rodney is such a widely admired figure throughout the world, especially in poor countries and among oppressed peoples everywhere.

The Endless Crisis reviewed on Systemic Disorder blog

February 20, 2024

The Endless Crisis is a welcome, and very needed, departure from the usual apologetics for capitalist outcomes. Professors Foster and McChesney provide a single source for understanding the present economic impasse, laying out with devastating precision the reasons for the economic crisis, the inevitability of crisis, the inequality and instability inherent in the capitalist system, and the need to move to a more humane system.

Oliver Villar interviewed in Asia Times Online

February 20, 2024

What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade?

Oliver Villar: The main motivation goes sometime back. I think it has to do firstly with my own experiences in growing up in working class suburbs in Sydney, Australia. It always has been an area that I found very curious and fascinating just to think about how rampant and persuasive drugs really are in our communities, and just by looking at it in more recent times how much worse the drug problem has become, not just in lower socio-economic areas, but everywhere. But from then on, when I finally had the opportunity to do so, I actually undertook this as a PhD thesis. I spent my time carefully looking at firstly what was written on the drug trade, but as coming from Latin America, I was very interested in particular in the Latin American drug trade as well.

The Rise of the Tea Party reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

The 'Tea Party' comes in for close scrutiny in a new book by Anthony DiMaggio, which exposes that faction's pretensions to be a real social movement as false, dominated as it is from the top-down by established right-wing forces, argues William Alderson.

The God Market reviewed by Richard Carrier

February 20, 2024

I found The God Market vital reading for a number of reasons (and that's my favorite kind of book: one that has multiple uses and educates me on several subjects at once). You will get a quick primer on the history of Indian government and foreign and domestic policy from 1947 to the present (you certainly won't have been taught any of that in high school). You will get an excellent summary of what "globalization" actually means in practice and how it is affecting and changing religion and ideology the world over, with India as a star example ... But what I found most useful of all is the picture I saw throughout of what actual, contemporary Hinduism is and is like (and how it has changed, and is changing).

Wisconsin Uprising reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

This collection of 17 essays by 19 writers is a serious attempt by seasoned activists in the North American labour movement to come to grips with the phenomenon that swept Wisconsin in the late winter and spring of 2011. The writers clearly share a passionate commitment to building support for oppositional movements in the States, identify organised labour as an essential component of this project, and see active participation as a necessary part of their commitment. Beyond this, they bring a variety of experiences and political analyses to bear in their contributions.

José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology reviewed on Upside Down World

February 20, 2024

This anthology provides an illuminating insight into the writings and philosophy of Peruvian thinker and journalist, José Carlos Mariátegui. A pioneer for more contemporary thinkers such as Ernesto Che Guevara, and analyst of continuous struggles such as the Indigenous "problem," Mariátegui sought to rethink Marxism in a manner which would provide Peru and Latin America with its own Marxist reality. Mariátegui's non-dogmatic thought transcends history to reflect current reality.

Read an excerpt of The Contradictions of "Real Socialism" by Michael A. Lebowitz on LINKS

February 20, 2024

Our friends at LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal have posted an exclusive excerpt of Michael A. Lebowitz's forthcoming title, The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted. Click here to read it, and look for the book later this month!

Wisconsin Uprising reviewed on ZNet

February 20, 2024

The Wisconsin Uprising in February-March 2011 was one of the most exciting events in a long time in this country's history. People mobilized on a scale not seen since the early 1970s, initially to protest a draconian assault on working people and public services intended to serve them, but it developed into a larger protest over the meaning of "democracy" in the contemporary United States. And though the protests ultimately failed to stop passage of an unjust law, it served and still serves as an inspiration to people in Wisconsin and around the world.