Category: Monthly Review Press /

“All my life, all my strength”–Samir Amin’s “Long Revolution” reviewed by Marx & Philosophy

February 20, 2024

Samir Amin, who was a leading Marxist analyst of African underdevelopment, capitalism and globalisation, passed away in August 2018. The Long Revolution of the Global South is the second volume of his memoirs and was published in English in 2019. The book provides fascinating insight into Amin’s take on global events and the role he played in various initiatives to confront the grotesque levels of inequality engendered by global capitalism….

New! “Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living”

February 20, 2024

How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living....

What the Fall of the Wall Really Meant: Workers World reviews Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

This Nov. 9, the world’s imperialists and big capitalists will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will fill the media, all too available to them, with lies claiming this event was a victory for democracy and freedom. They will be slandering the German Democratic Republic and all the good and progressive acts of the once-socialist part of Germany…

“Timely anachronism”–New West Indian Guide reviews “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

This latest work by Gerald Horne, born January 3, 1949 and still producing history monographs at a rate of knots, inspired me to wonder why he is not better known in Britain. ...

On being a ‘good ancestor’–Marx & Philosophy looks at “A Redder Shade of Green”

February 20, 2024

A Redder Shade of Green is one of the more grounded books I have encountered this year. Ian Angus’s concerns are earthly, practical, and immediate, all of which are virtues given how his eco-socialism stands in stark contra-distinction to neoliberal ecological reasoning...

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

February 20, 2024

That capitalist medicine prioritises the generation of surplus value over the health of populations should be obvious to any critical student or scholar in the field, but where Waitzkin and colleagues depart from this basic assumption is in demonstrating the political economy of health in the current phase of neoliberalism where, for example, the processes of financialization have eclipsed material production….

“If Not Now, When? Finding a feminism for 2020”–Zillah Eisenstein via NYU Press

February 20, 2024

I ask us all to think as imaginatively as possible in these next several months before the first primaries. I see these current thoughts as a continuance of the challenge thrown out by me in my recent book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, to think boldly about how we find the newest anti-racist feminisms that can mobilize for the 2020 election and beyond.

Lying to pretend things are OK: ResoluteReader looks at “The Lie of Global Prosperity”

February 20, 2024

The end of 2019 has seen a growing ‘global revolt’ in countries as varied as Hong Kong, Chile, Iraq, Ecuador, Catalonia and Lebanon. Seth Donnelly's new book is not about these revolts, but is an explanation of the dynamics that have driven the impoverishment of the Global South and how the ruling class seeks to justify things....

“30 Years Later: Another View of the Fall of the Berlin Wall”–Victor Grossman, via Portside

February 20, 2024

Berlin — Media jubilation reaches a climax on November 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their ‘welcome present’ of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system....

“A left-wing memoir to treasure”–Twentieth Century Communism reviews Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Much of the interest in Sheehan’s life-story has concentrated upon her journey from being a young nun in Philadelphia in the early 1960s to her joining the ‘Official’ IRA and subsequently the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in the 1970s. Her own text, Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun(published in the mid-1990s), has helped to focus readers’ attention upon this unusual trajectory.