Sensible use of crops? Burn them: “The Biofuels Deception” reviewed by Counterfire
February 20, 2024
"The idea of biofuels was only given serious attention because it was a way for agribusiness to manipulate the market...."
Category: Monthly Review Press /
Raising the bar for biographical writing: Marxist Left Review looks at “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”
February 20, 2024
Michael Heinrich has raised the standards of biographical writing with Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. In content and scope, it is an unparalleled work of scholarship. It makes Marx relevant to our understanding of capitalist society, while cutting down the overgrown myths about him....
“A deep look into the dark world of the jazz industry”–Portside reviews Gerald Horne’s “Jazz and Justice”
February 20, 2024
“No artist is able to overcome, through his own individual resources, the contradiction of enchained art within an enchained society. The most which we can hope to accomplish is the contradiction of such a society through emancipated art, and even in this attempt he might well be the victim of despair.”—Theodor Adorno
“The never-ending project of building Marxism”–Science & Society considers Samir Amin’s “Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value”
February 20, 2024
Samir Amin participated in many of the debates among Marxists about how to best understand capitalism that took place over the course of his lifetime. This book touches on many of those, including for example the issues of monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism....
Author Eve Ottenberg reviews Seth Donnelly’s “The Lie of Global Prosperity”
February 20, 2024
Neoliberals love to quote the World Bank’s rosy statistics about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Unfortunately, those statistics are skewed and manipulated to the point of outright prevarication, as Seth Donnelly demonstrates in his book, The Lie of Global Prosperity. He quotes a breathless World Bank press release, ‘soon 90 percent of the world’s population will live on $1.90 a day or more’…
Marx & Philosophy looks at “Trump in the White House”–modestly hoping that looming tragedy turns into farce
February 20, 2024
‘The only conceivable answer today to cascading planetary catastrophe is a broad-based ecological and social revolution, in which the population mobilizes to protect the future of humanity: a revolutionary war for the planet’...
“What capitalism needs are human automata”–AUR reviews “Miseducating for the Global Economy”
February 20, 2024
Gerald Coles’ Miseducating for the Global Economy takes a critical look at what we are told by people who hardly ever enter a classroom but are called educational experts or educational policy makers, and politicians, the corporate media, and state officials… And then there are right-wing think tanks, CEOs, businesspeople, and rafts of capitalism’s little helpers….
Gerald Horne at DC’s Sankofa Books: Southern Africa and the Roots of Jazz
February 20, 2024
On July 5, prolific author Gerald Horne appeared at Sankofa Video, Books & Cafe in Washington, DC to discuss two of his latest books, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music and White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela
New! “Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism”
February 20, 2024
Winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy – Paul A. Baran Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains—vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals—Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx’s own theory of exploitation.
Gerald Horne talks to Black Perspectives about “Jazz and Justice”
February 20, 2024
"I grew up in Jim Crow St. Louis with working class parents with roots in Mississippi. From an early age I recall a guitar in our house, that our father would pluck from time to time. Undoubtedly, my younger brother Marvin Horne—who has played with such giants as percussionists, Chico Hamilton and Elvin Jones, and as part of Aretha Franklin’s band just before she expired—was influenced to pick up this instrument because of its ubiquitous presence in our small house...."