Category: Monthly Review Press /

The 2018 Socialist Register: Rethinking Democracy launches

The 2018 Socialist Register: Rethinking Democracy launches

On February 15, 2018, in Toronto, editor Leo Panitch moderated a panel discussion with four of the contributors to Rethinking Democracy, the latest edition of the Socialist Register. This 2018 volume was conceived as a companion to the 2017 SR, Rethinking Revolution. Central to both volumes, and to this discussion, is the premise that no revival of socialist politics in the twenty-first century can occur apart from founding radical new democratic institutions and practices.

“Trump This!” Counterpunch reviews John Bellamy Foster’s book about … You-Know-Who

“Trump This!” Counterpunch reviews John Bellamy Foster’s book about … You-Know-Who

In Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, John Bellamy Foster contextualizes the conditions that gave rise to the 45th US president. The author’s thesis is that this billionaire chief executive arrived after four decades of income and wealth shifting from the bottom and middle to the top. ¶ An economy of, by and for a tiny elite spawns a particular polity….

“The Wire and the World”: Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney via Jacobin

“The Wire and the World”: Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney via Jacobin

Helena Sheehan, author of the recent The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, and Seamus Sweeney, a “recovering academic,” who has written about the representation of Baltimore in the work of David Simon, recently collaborated on an article for Jacobin about how the decade-old TV series, The Wire, was a Marxist’s idea of what TV drama should be...

Gerald Horne on the Centrality of Race, via WORT Community Radio

Gerald Horne on the Centrality of Race, via WORT Community Radio

Allen Ruff, a host of A Public Affair on radio station WORT (89.9FM, Madison, WI), interviews the irrepressible African-American historian Gerald Horne, author of numerous titles exploring the centrality of race and class for understanding the contemporary world. His most recent book is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean

Counterfire reviews A Redder Shade of Green

Counterfire reviews A Redder Shade of Green

Ecosocialism is often seen as something of throwaway buzzword on the left, with some commenting that today’s left, which at least acknowledges that environmental concerns are essential part of the criticism of capitalism today, doesn’t even need it. Ian Angus, a writer of books such as Facing the Anthropocene and Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket Books 2011), with Simon Butler, and maintainer of the blog Climate and Capitalism, feels that it is a term that means much more than just a passing nod of one movement to another....

ResoluteReader reviews Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

ResoluteReader reviews Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

In the introduction to his latest book historian Gerald Horne makes clear the consequences of European settlement in the Americas:
"Though disease spread by these interlopers is often trotted out to explain the spectacular downturn in the fortunes of indigenous Americans, genocide – in virtually every meaning of the term, including volitional acts by invading settlers – is the proximate cause of this towering mountain of cadavers. Thus, even when enslaved Africans chose suicide, which they were often forced to do, it would be follow to suggest that enslavers were guiltless...."