Category: Monthly Review Press /

NEW! Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy edited by Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber

February 20, 2024

Socialist Register 2013 seeks to explore and clarify strategy for the Left in the light of new challenges and new opportunities. Socialists today have to confront two realities: that they cannot avoid the question of reforms and a gradualist path out of capitalism, and that the organizational vehicles for socialism will most likely have to abide by different structures and principles than those that dominated left politics in the 20th century. Though solutions are not obvious, Socialist Register 2013 interrogates these dilemmas and critiques some unhelpful radical thinking that obstructs the reconsideration of socialist strategy for the 21st century.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed in The Bullet

February 20, 2024

Drawing upon first-hand interviews with both paramilitaries, elites and their victims, and with corroboration provided by thousands of U.S. State Department documents (obtained through Freedom of Information Act document requests), Sprague's incisive contribution to the historical record makes it all too clear how the U.S. government and a collection of local elites have consistently undermined democracy in Haiti – from the nineteenth century right through to the present day.

The Endless Crisis reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

The Great Recession has ended, unlike slow/no growth. For a deeper sense of why, get a copy of The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney. The duo of scholars and professors connect the dots in a radical critique of modern-day capitalism. Theirs is a rigorous analysis, empirical and theoretical, of the twin trends of slowing growth and growing tumult.

NEW! Faces of Latin America: Fourth Edition

February 20, 2024

Faces of Latin America has sold more than 50,000 copies since it first appeared in 1991, and is widely considered to be the best available introduction in English to the economies, politics, demography, social structures, environment and cultures of Latin America. This fourth edition updates the book for 2012 and covers the most pressing issues facing Latin America today.

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).