Category: Monthly Review Press /

The 15-year rising: Truthout reviews Fred Wilcox’s “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks”

February 20, 2024

Fighting fossil fuel companies can be dangerous business. The people of County Mayo, Ireland, found that out when they rose up against Shell Oil in the early 2000s. The uprising lasted 15 years. Protesters were beaten and jailed. But they delayed the refinery’s opening by 10 years, cost Shell billions of dollars and caused the company a public relations nightmare, as a new book by Fred Wilcox, Shamrocks and Oil Slicks, recounts....

Understanding the chains of global imperialism: Intan Suwandi visits THIS IS HELL!

February 20, 2024

Intan Suwandi, author of the recently published Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, talked to Chuck Mertz, host of the weekly radio show, THIS IS HELL!, about how individual workers in the Global South — despite the purported demise of imperialism — continue to be intricately controlled by multinationals.

Intellectual rigor + intensely engaged activism = Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

The backward and repressive nature of the 1950s in regard to rights and opportunities for women has been widely exposed, not least through cultural representations like ‘Mad Men’, Doris Day films, and every single domestic appliance or kitchen advert from that decade and beyond. Women are housewives and mothers, slim and glamorous with high heels and frilly aprons. It’s easy to laugh now at these caricatures which hid an uncomfortable and often very unhappy reality. But it would never have occurred to me that in contrast to the life of a 1950s housewife, a bright and highly intelligent young girl would choose, in preference to that fate, to become a nun. But so was the case with Helena Sheehan, born into 1940s USA.

Socialism & Democracy reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Each episode is given a critical and self-critical exposition, including evaluations of well-known political figures as well as some who were lesser known but equally important. Traversing Cold War America, Catholicism, the Sixties New Left, Sinn Fein and the IRA, the Communist Party of Ireland and the International Communist movement, Navigating the Zeitgeist is as much a sweeping overview as it is a personal narrative. In both senses, it’s an insightful and informative read.

New, improved “Soviet threat”–Socialism & Democracy looks at “The Russians Are Coming, Again”

February 20, 2024

The authors, taking The New York Times as their prime source, argue that what is called Russiagate, a story about the nefarious use of computer hacking, spying, and bribing and threatening to expose public figures, including President Trump, is being promoted day-after-day as the root cause of the outcome of the 2016 election....

How General Strike Rhetoric Became A City-Wide Reality: New Politics reviews Cal Winslow’s “Radical Seattle”

February 20, 2024

Calls for a general strike have long been a staple of ‘resolutionary activity’ on the U.S. left. During moments of crisis and militancy—from the mass firing of air traffic controllers in 1981 to Occupy Wall Street and last winter’s federal government shutdown—rousing speeches are invariably made and motions duly adopted, which urge all workers to walk out in protest....

Intellectual archaeology: Green Left Weekly explains why we need Michael Heinrich’s biography of Marx

February 20, 2024

Marx has been the subject of over 30 biographies since then, not bad for a man who rejected any public honours in his lifetime, calling them a ‘cult of personality’. So, why read another account of his life? Well, one reason is that the entirety of Marx’s writing has now been made public by the Marx Engels Collected Works (MEGA2) project...

Pelf from workers’ hides–Truthout on Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

In recent decades, as U.S. corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to save money on wages, GM, H&M, Apple and dozens of other companies established elaborate supply chains in Asia, Mexico and Latin America, where workers earn pennies per hour. These chains are geographically expansive networks organized by foreign companies to produce semi-finished goods in different places before final assembly for huge global corporations....

New! “How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day”

February 20, 2024

Few authors are able to write cogently in both the scientific and the economic spheres. Even fewer possess the intellectual scope needed to address science and economics at a macro as well as a micro level. But Paul Cockshott, using the dual lenses of Marxist economics and technological advance, has managed to pull off a stunningly acute critical perspective of human history, from pre-agricultural societies to the present. In How the World Works, Cockshott connects scientific, economic, and societal strands to produce a sweeping and detailed work of historical analysis....

The shattering of two worldviews: History Ireland on Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Professor Helena Sheehan is internationally known as one of Ireland’s leading left-wing intellectuals. Her book Marxism and the philosophy of science: a critical history, first published in 1985, is the classic work on its subject and is still in print. She has now written her autobiography, covering the first part of her life from the 1940s to the 1980s...