Category: Monthly Review Press /

An indomitable anti-Zionist Jewish feminist talks about the steadfastness (sumud) of Palestinians (“A Land With A People” coeditor interviewed for ‘The Famous Feminist’)

February 20, 2024

"...a woman in Gaza, her family had been bombed out of their home. But she was determined to make bread and she had found a hot plate. She was making these breads. She said you could get killed going to the bakery, you can’t go to the bakery. They're bombing the bakeries. So I'm doing this. Her kids are in the street, sitting under a tarpaulin. And she's making bread. That's a form of heroism, you know?
...I asked them, “Do you ever feel like you should leave?” They replied, 'We stay here. We're not leaving. This is our home.' That's a form of resistance."

WATCH: Commune or Nothing!

February 20, 2024

This virtual panel examined the commune and communal organizing as part of the project of revolutionary social transformation. The speakers addressed how socialist communes can be used to abolish capitalism’s logic, based on the exploitation of the human being and the expropriation of nature, along with the range of oppressions (including racial, gender, sexual, and colonial oppression) in capitalist society. The speakers – Kali Akuno, John Bellamy Foster, Chris Gilbert, and M.E. O’Brien – drew from various theoretical perspectives and practical experiences.

Fascinating blow by blow on the Cuban workers’ parliaments (Pedro Ross reviewed for ‘New West Indian Guide’)

February 20, 2024

Mass meetings took place in 80,000 workplaces, neighborhood committees, farmers’ organisations, and the Federation of Cuban Women. These acted as a two-way conduit, informing the workers and farmers of the reality of the situation while, at the same time, allowing for votes on different options, all unpalatable, but some more acceptable than others. By giving ordinary people a direct say and a stake in the solution of the crisis, the Workers’ Parliaments brought back a commitment to the social gains of the Revolution and enabled Cuban society to slowly emerge from the “Special Period.”

How capitalism was born in ‘robbery, violence and fraud’ (The War Against the Commons reviewed by ‘Socialist Worker’)

February 20, 2024

As Marx wrote, the common rights “were simply redefined as crimes: poaching, wood-theft, trespass”. The war against the commons removed the rights for people to hunt, forage, collect firewood and more. Game laws put restrictions on the poor, where you were criminalised even “if you took one hare when your family was starving”. The rich enclosed lands to hunt for sport, while the poor could be sentenced to death for hunting deer...

Contradictions of the contemporary accumulation regime (Socialist Register 2023 reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

February 20, 2024

as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war...

“No mere cheerleader for Marx” (How to Read Marx’s Capital reviewed in ‘Socialism and Democracy’)

February 20, 2024

Heinrich’s reading guide is the best that I have ever come across for volume 1 of Capital and I am certain it is a necessary edition for any person who takes their study of Marx’s 'Capital' seriously. Heinrich explains that “Capital provides crucial elements of the basic knowledge that is needed to fundamentally change social structures”. As such this volume, read in conjunction with Marx’s work, should prove valuable to anyone, inside or outside the academy, who is interested and invested in transforming capitalist social structures into something more beneficial to all.

Parallels between the old Cold War in the Pacific and the new… (The Hidden History of the Korean War reviewed in ‘Socialist China’)

February 20, 2024

Peace was very much an option...Reading Izzy Stone’s reporting today, it’s striking the extent to which these mechanisms of Cold War still exist and are being used to wage a New Cold War. The military bases, the troop deployments, the nuclear threats that aimed to contain socialism and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world in the 1950s continue to serve the same purposes in 2023.

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