Category: Monthly Review Press /

“E.P. Thompson’s Socialist Humanism” in Against the Current

February 20, 2024

“The English working class ‘did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’ In frequently quoted lines from the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1780-1832), E.P. Thompson endeavored to ‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ ¶ More broadly, Thompson sought to elucidate class as a historical phenomenon that involved changing human relationships over time, rather than being a static structure or simple category of analysis….”

Helena Sheehan, Irish activist, author, coming to the U.S. for East Coast Book Tour!

February 20, 2024

Helena Sheehan, Marxist scholar, activist, and author, will soon be leaving Dublin, Ireland for a U.S. book tour of her recently published The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. Her first appearance will be Thursday, May 25, 6:30pm, NYC, New York University, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University, 53 Washington Square South, Manhattan

At least 484 Syrian and Iraqi civilians killed in air strikes, admits Cent Com: Gerald Horne weighs in

February 20, 2024

On June 3, The Independent and other media reported that the U.S.-led coalition (or Central Command) admitted killing at least 484 civilians in air strikes against Isis in Syria and Iraq. Gerald Horne, historian and author of several books, including the upcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, appeared on RT International to discuss this report and its “scandalous understatement” of the loss of innocent lives.

Ursula Huws speaks on “Capitalist crisis, technological change and the restructuring of global labour markets”

February 20, 2024

Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age, recently gave a talk sponsored by the Contemporary Philosophy of Technology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Watch the video here.

America’s Addiction to Terrorism reviewed in Socialism & Democracy

February 20, 2024

Henry Giroux is one of our foremost critical voices. With America’s Addiction to Terrorism, he once again applies his critical pedagogy to the US, finding a common thread of growing authoritarian state terrorism through 12 chapters on such varied phenomena as “selfie culture,” austerity, education, cinema, nuclear proliferation, and the state of public intellectuals, while neatly tying these threads to the more obvious tapestry of racism, police militarization, and torture....

“The powerful consumer is just another product”: Big Farms Make Big Flu reviewed in Counterfire

February 20, 2024

During the nineteenth century, three US presidents died in office, or shortly after it, from drinking the water in the White House. This was probably because that water was drawn downstream from the marsh where the White House’s ‘nightsoil’ was dumped, including that of the slaves who helped build it. For Rob Wallace, this is therefore an ‘epiphenomenon of empire’, as ‘on what was a glorified plantation, growing not crops but imperial designs alienated from people and places alike, enslaved men and women were obligated to kill their masters bucket by bucket’…

Massive devastation/No remorse: VVA Veteran Books in Review II looks at The American War in Vietnam

February 20, 2024

During a soliloquy in Julius Caesar, Brutus says, ‘The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.’ His words clearly apply to John Marciano’s book, The American War in Vietnam…. Whereas Brutus speaks of Caesar’s use of power, Marciano addresses the misuse of the Noble Cause principle espoused by the United States in the Vietnam War. ¶ Marciano, a Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland, relates this principle to America’s employing military power in general—and in particular to what he calls the ‘staggering human and ecological losses’ resulting from ignoring remorse relative to the Vietnam War...

“With Krleža; Against Organized Idiocy”: A Croatian Forum interview with Željko Cipriš

February 20, 2024

Zeljko Cipriš is the translator of Harbors Rich in Ships: The Selected Revolutionary Writings of Miroslav Krleža, Radical Luminary of Modern World Literature, coming very soon from Monthly Review Press. He was recently interviewed by Rade Dragojević for the Forum, a Croatian weekly, published in Zagreb...

Ursula Huws on the Future of Work, via the LSE Business Review

February 20, 2024

“[T]he universe is full of new opportunities for commodification. The question is, can the planet sustain them?”
Ursula Huws is the author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. Recently, Huws wrote a follow-up article for the London School of Economics and Political Science Business Review.

Marxism 2.0? Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed by International Socialism

February 20, 2024

If Karl Marx were writing Capital today and had paid attention when Friedrich Engels and his publisher implored him to make the first chapters of volume one less abstract and more accessible, rather than dismissing their suggestions with declarations about a royal road, he might well have chosen a specific commodity from which he could unravel capital. And, if he wanted to choose a commodity in which the relations of the contemporary political economy had been crystallised, he might well have chosen an iPhone. In following the social relations that sit behind the iPhone, Marx would have observed children mining for cassiterite in the Congo; followed the global production chains from the neo-futurist Apple Campus in Cupertino …