Category: Monthly Review Press /

ResoluteReader reviews A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism

ResoluteReader reviews A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism

February 20, 2024

There is a growing movement of people thinking about how their food is grown, what it contains and its impact on their health and the environment. Often this is tied up with an individualistic view of improving the world – the idea that you can save the world by simply choosing the best food with the least impact on the planet. Eric Holt-Giménez explains he wrote "A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism" precisely to argue that this approach is inadequate...

Ecosocialism or planetary barbarism: International Socialist Review considers Facing the Anthropocene

Ecosocialism or planetary barbarism: International Socialist Review considers Facing the Anthropocene

February 20, 2024

According to Stephen Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, poor little America got hoodwinked by devious Asians, signing a deal that would wreck the economy and throw millions of people out of work, especially (white) coal miners in Appalachia, whom the president loves dearly. Climate change is an insignificant issue compared to these hardships and injustices. Coal is a fantastic fuel that will return America to greatness. ¶ Contrast this with the closing of Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System...

New! Rethinking Democracy: Socialist Register 2018

New! Rethinking Democracy: Socialist Register 2018

February 20, 2024

For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy?

Sabotaging Apartheid: A Jacobin interview with “Red” Ronnie Kasrils

Sabotaging Apartheid: A Jacobin interview with “Red” Ronnie Kasrils

February 20, 2024

Ronnie Kasrils is the author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, an account of his wife Eleanor’s work as a clandestine agent for the underground ANC. Here, he talks with Jacobin‘s Marcus Barnett about his own work as a revolutionary, and the future of South Africa’s left:

Steve Early on Unions Confronting “Weinsteins in the Workplace”

Steve Early on Unions Confronting “Weinsteins in the Workplace”

February 20, 2024

Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress and Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, looks at the role of labor unions in dealing with sexual harassment and how “to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the ‘house of labor’”...

New! Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

New! Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

February 20, 2024

Urdang’s memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home, as she grapples with the power of nostalgia, and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continues to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, she belongs. “My South Africa!” she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, “How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain?”

Hellenic News of America reviews The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

Hellenic News of America reviews The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

February 20, 2024

Reports have it that Greece has begun to reenter the European bond market, where it has for the past decade been crucified on what the American statesman William Jennings Bryan once called a cross of gold…. ¶ The election of Syriza in a Europe none of whose other nations had dared to empower a government committed to breaking the stranglehold of the banks was its gesture of defiance. And all Europe took hope from it. Its consequent failure was, as Helena Sheehan’s The Syriza Wave makes clear, a major international event…

“Good ancestors” must be red and green: a colorful review of A Redder Shade of Green by Green Left Weekly

February 20, 2024

Two decades ago, barely anyone called themselves an ecosocialist. Yet today the term is widespread on the left. ¶ This comes from an awareness that any viable alternative to capitalism must do away with the current destructive relationship between human society and the wider natural world. It also stems from a recognition that too many socialists in the 20th century failed to take environmental issues seriously. ¶ Climate and Capitalism editor and ecosocialist activist Ian Angus’s latest book, A Redder Shade of Green, is an impressive contribution to this vibrant trend in radical politics...

“Gangster capitalism & nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America”: Henry Giroux via Salon

“Gangster capitalism & nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America”: Henry Giroux via Salon

February 20, 2024

Henry A. Giroux, founding figure in the movement for critical pedagogy and author of more than sixty books, including America’s Addiction to Terrorism and America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, is one of North America’s most influential public intellectuals. He writes in Salon about the grotesqueries of Trump–and our need for a vocabulary that sees us as agents, not victims...

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