Category: Monthly Review Press /

A retrospective view of Ireland from the far Left: The Irish Catholic considers “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

A retrospective view of Ireland from the far Left: The Irish Catholic considers “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Dr Helena Sheehan is a well-known left-wing intellectual. Her book, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: Critical History, published in 1985, became a classic work on its subject. ¶ She has now written her autobiography, and this is the first volume, covering her life from the 1940s to the 1980s, a book which is full of interest for a particular view of Ireland and the world today....

Work is Inevitable But Its Organization Is Not: CounterPunch considers “How the World Works”

Work is Inevitable But Its Organization Is Not: CounterPunch considers “How the World Works”

February 20, 2024

All human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern, have an important commonality—the need to work. Water, food, shelter and other basics of life don’t arrive as gifts. Work is required to secure them and to raise the next generation. ¶ So fundamental is this basic principal of human life that generations of Marxist theorists have based analyses of social societies and structures on the economic base of a given society….

How the Coronavirus Unmasked Capitalism: Gerald Horne Talks to WBAI’s “Building Bridges”

February 20, 2024

Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne--whose latest book The Dawning of the Apocalypse will be published in July--recently talked to Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash, hosts of WBAI's Building Bridges, the longest running labor and community affairs radio program in the New York Metropolitan area, about the history of inequality behind the current horrific impact of the coronavirus....

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

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

“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”

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

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

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”

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”

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....

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