Category: Monthly Review Press /

Whiteness and the opening of slave markets: Transmotion reviews Gerald Horne’s “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

“In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class. In this, his thirtieth book, Horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. Through a focus on English colonial projects, Horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure....

New! “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift”

February 20, 2024

In The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, departing from much previous scholarship, adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth....

Michael Heinrich: The Actuality Of Marx’s Communism

February 20, 2024

There is no doubt that communism was Karl Marx’s political goal. Nonetheless, he never published a book or an article with a clear and extensive demonstration of what communism means....

Capitalism and ecological theft: This is Hell! debriefs John Bellamy Foster on “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

A few days ago, Chuck Mertz, host of This is Hell!, a weekly radio longform political interview program emanating from Chicago, phoned John Bellamy Foster, author, with Brett Clark, of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift to discuss the many, devastating ways that “capitalism has ruined our relationship with nature.

Zillah Eisenstein: feminism, socialism, and the imperative of confronting white supremacy, via Out of Bounds

February 20, 2024

Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of political theory at Ithaca College and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently talked with Tish Perlman, host of Out of Bounds, a weekly radio show focusing on people living, working, and thinking outside the mainstream. In this interview, Zillah discusses the necessity to abolish pervasive white supremacy, her Communist upbringing, and how we should all just shut up about Trump...

NEW! “The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States”

February 20, 2024

“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites....

Not afraid to challenge “facts” about Marx’s life: Socialist Review on “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked….

“Setting the record straight”–The Real Democracy Movement reviews “Jazz & Justice”

February 20, 2024

Jazz is enjoying a new wave of popularity. A gig by Kamasi Washington, the last musician named in Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice, attracts big crowds, and his recordings make big sales…

Progressive Populist + SocialistAction = 2 reviews of “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism”

February 20, 2024

"Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads..."
¶ "The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…"

Gerald Horne: Africans See China as Counterweight to US and Europe

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, author of Jazz and Justice and the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse, recently talked to Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, on Black Agenda Radio, about how Africa, in contrast to the United States, tends to see China's role in geopolitics...