Category: Monthly Review Press /

New! “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century”

February 20, 2024

Lengthening hours, lessening pay, no parental leave, scant job security… Never have so many workers needed so much support. Yet the very labor unions that could garner us protections and help us speak up for ourselves are growing weaker every day. In an age of rampant inequality, of increasing social protest and strikes—and when a majority of workers say they want to be union members—why does union density continue to decline? Shaun Richman offers some answers in his book, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming

“From Commune to Capitalism” reviewed by Science & Society

February 20, 2024

This book is expressive of a new wave of scholarly reassessments of China’s transition from its socialist past to capitalist present. From a Chinese perspective, it has not much in common with the canonical CCP narratives widely circulated in printed media and Party phone apps, as Zhun Xu employs a “betrayal of the revolution” rhetoric that pinpoints ruptures between a socialist China under Mao Zedong’s leadership and a capitalist China headed by Deng Xiaoping and afterwards ...

Why the presidential debates aren’t about imperialism: The Progressive Populist looks at Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

Imperialism does not play out much in the 2020 presidential race. That says more about US corporate power over the two political parties and other institutions such as the new media, e.g., Comcast owning MSNBC. ¶ Meanwhile, as the US has deindustrialized, 79 percent of the globe’s industrial workers toiled in the Global South in 2010, over double the figure in 1950. The fruits of their exploited labor sell in the Global North

“Trump’s Immigration Suspension Doesn’t Prevent Unemployment or COVID-19 Spread”: David L. Wilson, via Truthout

February 20, 2024

Despite Trump’s promises, this reduction of immigration will do nothing to slow the pandemic or to protect citizens’ jobs. Its only real effect will be to excite Trump’s base, disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of families, and expose the underlying hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy....

Action Guide for Green New Deal Advocates: Science for the People reviews “Creating an Ecological Society”

February 20, 2024

“Creating an Ecological Society is an important and timely book for two reasons. First, the authors merge two rich areas of discourse—environmental conservation and anti-capitalism—in a seamless narrative that underscores both the urgency of our times and the opportunity of the moment. Second, authors Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams describe how creating an ecological society based on a set of shared values can directly improve the lived experience of individuals across the globe...

Delusions of the American Revolution: Science & Society looks at “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

In this comprehensive study of the connections among capitalism, slavery and white supremacy, Gerald Horne, the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of more than 30 scholarly books, takes a deep dive into the 17th century, revealing fallacies in what later ages have said about the earlier ones, showing the slow and steady consolidation of axes of differentiation in the service of capital, and ultimately connecting the choice in 2016 of “a vulgar billionaire” with the cross-class coalition that originated in the colonial settlements of the New World....

U.S. racism: hysteria for which jazz sought a cure–Race & Class reviews Gerald Horne’s “Jazz and Justice”

February 20, 2024

Viewed, it would seem, from every possible angle, jazz seems to be a topic about which there is little left to say. But no one has quite seen it in the lurid, smoky light of the jazz demimonde – a world of pimps, gangsters, strung out divas, knife-wielding trumpeters, Bolshevik pianists and impresarios in white hoods. The author’s research is breathtaking. To read the book is to be barraged with anecdotes, quotations, statistical asides and mini-histories that are often no more than a paragraph long....

Unprecedented attention to history, geography, background figures: Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières reviews “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

The first volume of Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx, if any indication of the two volumes yet to come, signals a genuine event in the understanding of Marx and his work. With it, the terrain for understanding all aspects of Marx’s life has likely changed fundamentally....

Who Should We Blame for Coronavirus?–Rob Wallace has some answers…

February 20, 2024

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, explains, via The American Scholar, that if we want to understand global outbreaks of infectious disease, you have to look at global agriculture....

COVID-19 Does Discriminate: Gerald Horne discusses how the virus “rips the mask off US society”

February 20, 2024

Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair, from community radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, talks to Dr. Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author—whose book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse, is forthcoming this July. In their conversation, Horne explores the assertion that the arrival of COVID-19 has exposed inequities in our social system and continues to act as a catalyst for deep and simmering social and economic crises—all worsened by the current political system....