Category: Monthly Review Press /

Novel as biography (Radek reviewed in ‘Against the Current’)

In his 1995 novel Radek, published in English translation for the first time last year by Monthly Review Press, Stefan Heym portrays Karl Radek as not only a man of the world but a perpetual outsider — a socially awkward contrarian with stereotypically Jewish features, thick glasses and a big mouth. In this, Heym likely saw in Karl Radek something of a kindred spirit.

The Fault in Our SARS in the news

As usual Rob Wallace has made the media rounds, this time with his latest book, The Fault in Our SARS. Listen and watch!

A history which is far from over (The War Against the Commons reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

Capital’s war against the commons continues today in the Global South, as does resistance to it. The removal of the people from the land to work in industrial cities is also part of the mechanism which creates the metabolic rift, one of the reasons for capitalism’s inherent environmental destructiveness. The route to overcoming this does not lie in individuals or communities returning to an idealised communal past. As Angus says, this has been the expectation of utopian communal groups since the Diggers established themselves on St George’s Hill in 1649...

How capitalism was born in ‘robbery, violence and fraud’ (The War Against the Commons reviewed by ‘Socialist Worker’)

As Marx wrote, the common rights “were simply redefined as crimes: poaching, wood-theft, trespass”. The war against the commons removed the rights for people to hunt, forage, collect firewood and more. Game laws put restrictions on the poor, where you were criminalised even “if you took one hare when your family was starving”. The rich enclosed lands to hunt for sport, while the poor could be sentenced to death for hunting deer...

Contradictions of the contemporary accumulation regime (Socialist Register 2023 reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war...

Register: Kohei Saito to speak at Ecosocialism 2023

Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito will be a keynote speaker at the Ecosocialism 2023, being organised by Green Left — and supported by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal — in Naarm/Melbourne over July 1–2.