Category: Monthly Review Press /

“The most important book…in years is John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century”–OffGuardian review

February 20, 2024

That first chapter goes on to consider two other products, iPhones and coffee. These too are produced in the global south for consumption in the north. Although very different products, Smith’s teasing out of the socioeconomic relations they embed shows their commonality. All are created under conditions of a super-exploitation which mainstream economics is at pains to conceal or obscure by a ‘value chain’ orthodoxy that would have us believe an iPhone made in China for $80 retails in the west for $800 not through exploitation but because the activities of shipping, advertising and packaging add $720 of value….

The Progressive Populist reviews Union Power

February 20, 2024

James Young serves up the pulse of workplace democracy in Union Power. His focus is on UE locals 506 and 618 that represent electrical manufacturing workers for General Electric, a global corporation. ¶ His narrative begins in 1937. Winds of global war rise, the Great Depression endures and the UE is born in a domestic landscape of labor dissent. ¶ In seven chapters of Young’s book, we discover the hows and whys of UE’s participatory democracy….

Socialist Worker talks to Ian Angus about Saving the Planet

February 20, 2024

How can we save the planet and stop catastrophic climate change? Recently, Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System and the recently released A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism, talked to Socialist Worker‘s Dave Sewell about just that.

Gerald Horne talks to Utrice Leid via the Progressive Radio Network

February 20, 2024

Historian Gerald Horne, author of over 30 books, including the forthcoming "The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean," talks to veteran news anchor and analyst, Utrice Leid about some of the major trouble spots in the world today and their connections to U.S. globalist agendas.

London: Ian Angus on the Anthropocene and Ecosocialism at Marxism 2017 Festival

February 20, 2024

Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System and, more recently, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism, speaks at the Marxism 2017 Festival in central London, July 8, 2017. (Questions and answers follow.)

Gerald Horne on the NAACP’s travel advisory for Missouri

February 20, 2024

Thinking of going to Missouri? Think again. Gerald Horne, author of several books on the history of racism and injustice in the Americas, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network about the NAACP’s first statewide travel advisory, for the state of Missouri. ¶ “Not only may we be returning to the bad old days of Jim Crow and US apartheid, but we may be going beyond that to the era of 1857 Dred Scott…”

Eve of Destruction…Or Revolution? Counterpunch reviews Creating an Ecological Society

February 20, 2024

‘In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.’ That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text. Capitalism is the reason our biosphere is collapsing and the only way humanity and the rest of earth’s species can survive is by ending capitalism….

Baltimore, August 22: Howard Ryan Brings Educational Justice to Red Emma’s

February 20, 2024

In or around Baltimore Tuesday, August 22? Come to Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse and hear Howard Ryan talk about his book, Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut

New! The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964

February 20, 2024

Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions in which that critique was formed.

Venezuela vs. US control of global energy market: Gerald Horne on the Black Agenda Report

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and author of the upcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Nellie Bailey on the Black Agenda Report