Category: Monthly Review Press /

“Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better”: Gerald Coles via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better....

Why Ours Is a Key Moment in Time: Socialism & Democracy on Samir Amin’s Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

February 20, 2024

Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
144 pp, $23 pbk, ISBN 9781583676011
By Samir Amin
Reviewed by Mat Callahan in Socialism and Democracy, vol. 32, no. 1, pp 174-77

“A Terrific Book”: Socialism & Democracy reviews Union Power by James Young

February 20, 2024

This is a terrific book. It deserves to be read carefully by both scholars and activists. In seven well-written chapters, James Young explores the emergence, struggles, victories and setbacks of a radical, democratic union, one that confronted powerful adversaries in the business, labor, and faith-based communities throughout the mid and late twentieth century.

An Important Message from John Bellamy Foster

February 20, 2024

In the 1990s, high tech firms and their mainstream media boosters proclaimed that the Internet and digital technology would unleash a new era that would destroy monopolies, liberate democratic impulses, and usher in what Bill Gates called “frictionless capitalism.” From the first, Monthly Review’s assessment was different. We foresaw instead the ways that the communications revolution would generate monopoly power on a scale never seen before.

“The Delusion of Deporting the Country’s Troubles Away by Banishing ‘Criminal Aliens’”: David L. Wilson via Truthout

February 20, 2024

David L. Wilson, with Jane Guskin, is the author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (2nd Edition). In his latest article for Truthout, Wilson asks, “Is there really any reason for the US government to deport non-citizens with criminal records?”

New! Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures

February 20, 2024

Just out! Gerald Coles’s Miseducating for the Global Economy provides a real education about the twenty-first-century global economy—and what corporations are doing to prevent our learning about it.

H-Net reviews James Young’s Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania

February 20, 2024

The United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America—the unwieldy name is usually shortened to United Electrical Workers, or UE—occupies a significant niche in the history of the American labor movement....

Warehouse Clearance Sale!

February 20, 2024

Unfortunately the warehouse clearance sale has ended.

The Progressive Populist reviews The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

February 20, 2024

Colonies and the political economy are two sides of the same coin. In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, historian Gerald Horne reveals the actors and factors behind the origin of a racial capitalism that haunts us now. ¶ It is no easy task, but Horne is up to it….

July 7: Howard Waitzkin comes to Beloit, WI to talk about Health Care Under the Knife

February 20, 2024

Howard Waitzkin, author, with the Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism, of Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health, will be in Beloit, Wisconsin Saturday, July 7 to discuss the U.S. health-care crisis — how we can rescue it and make it an integral part of a new and radically different society