Category: Monthly Review Press /

Spoiler alert: Capitalists will not make things better–The Progressive Populist reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

Spoiler alert: Capitalists will not make things better–The Progressive Populist reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

“In six chapters, Yates delivers a primer on radical economics. It is no mean feat, but he is up to it. ¶ In Chapter One, ‘The Working Class,’ Yates defines it, qualitatively and quantitatively. He refines the numbers that mainstream economists use to fog the oppressive nature of the system. ¶ Yates sketches an ‘analytical scaffolding’ of global labor, from the exploited (wages) and expropriated (theft). Yates explains how wage and unwaged labor are integral to the system, similar to the era of slave and ‘free’ workers...

Science & Society reviews Samir Amin’s “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”

Science & Society reviews Samir Amin’s “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”

In this short book Samir Amin, a distinguished left intellectual with a career spanning many decades, offers an analysis of Russia and its role in the transition from capitalism to socialism. The book consists of six essays written between 1990 and 2015, supplemented by a new commentary at the end. Amin’s approach combines the Marxist theory of historical materialism with World Systems theory....

A World to Win! reviews “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

A World to Win! reviews “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

In the 21st century, we live in a world wholly dominated by the US empire and its allies, and capitalism maintains its stranglehold on the lives of working class people across the entire globe, all the while destroying the environment, posing an existential threat not only to humanity but all life on Earth….

New! A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee

New! A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee

The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman—a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker—left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate—i.e., the Soviets—landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic....

Jeremy Kuzmarov: “Democrats play the Russia card … Trump wins”

Jeremy Kuzmarov: “Democrats play the Russia card … Trump wins”

The New York Times headline said it all: Mueller Finds No Trump Russia Conspiracy. ¶ After two years of investigation and $25 million in taxpayer dollars, the special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that President Donald J. Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election....

Revolutions Have Brought Disappointment–But Hope Remains: Stephanie Urdang on Southern Africa

Revolutions Have Brought Disappointment–But Hope Remains: Stephanie Urdang on Southern Africa

When I immigrated to the United States from South Africa towards the end of the 1960’s I was totally unaware of the wars of liberation against Portuguese colonialism that had begun in the early 1960’s in the neighboring countries of Mozambique and Angola. All I knew about Mozambique was the reputation of its capital, Lourenço Marques, as a cosmopolitan Portuguese-style city where white South Africans went on holiday….

Science & Society reviews Kohei Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

Science & Society reviews Kohei Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

Amid the rising tide of books on Marx and ecology, this book stands out. Much of this work has been about whether Marx’s analysis of capitalism was a blind commitment to industrial society that has ignored natural circumstances and ecological crisis. Kohei Saito brings Marx’s ecological notebooks into the debate, rediscovers Marx’s environmental concerns and their relevance to the critique of political economy, and reinforces the argument that Marx saw environmental crisis embedded in capitalism....