Category: Monthly Review Press /

“Trump’s Deportation Machine”: David L. Wilson in Jacobin

February 20, 2024

In 2017, Monthly Review Press will publish the second, updated edition of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers by David L. Wilson and Jane Guskin. Here, for Jacobin, David L. Wilson writes about Trump’s possible use of mass deportation to drive a wedge between workers:
“Like so much about the incoming administration, president-elect Donald Trump’s intentions for undocumented immigrants remain unclear. But he seems likely to go forward with a substantial program of ‘getting them out of our country.’..."

“An intellectual journey thru influenza and food systems”: Big Farms Make Big Flu reviewed in Lancet Infectious Diseases

February 20, 2024

As evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin put it in 1992: ‘Asbestos and cotton lint fibres are not the causes of cancer. They are the agent of social causes, of social formations that determine the nature of our productive and consumption lives, and in the end, it is only through changes in those social forces that we can get to the root problem of health’. Why would it be different for emerging infectious diseases? Was the west Africa Ebola epidemic caused by Ebola virus or by the dismantling of public health infrastructure in the countries where it emerged, following years of structural adjustment? What’s the agent? What’s the cause?

Marx and the Earth, by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, reviewed in International Socialism

February 20, 2024

Marxist analyses of the natural world have been the focus of intense debate recently, and the publication of any book that further explores what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought about the subject is something to be welcomed. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett have proven track records of writing some of the clearest books on the subject, and while Marx and the Earth is not a specific response to some of their recent critics, it is an important defence of Marx’s and Engels’s original work.

The Socialist Imperative reviewed in Against the Current

February 20, 2024

The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now 224 pp, $24 pbk, ISBN: 9781583675465 By Michael A. Lebowitz Reviewed by Karin Baker “I read plenty of articles, short and long, on... READ MORE

Alan Wieder talks about Studs Terkel on WFMT, Studs’s old Chicago radio station

February 20, 2024

Alan Wieder recently visited Chicago’s WFMT studios (98.7FM) and joined Tony Macaluso to discuss his book, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation. Studs was a long-time WFMT host, free-spirit, and renowned oral historian.

Want to “make America great again?” Read John Marciano’s The American War in Vietnam: reviewed in The Veteran

February 20, 2024

In the current environment of ‘embedded’ journalists, the truth about our wars is difficult to discern, but the history of the Vietnam War is well-documented and certainly provides evidence of the deadly, viciously destructive mind set of America’s political and military leadership since World War II. It is difficult for a high school student to accept that his or her country would tell boldface lies to lure them into enlisting and deploying to areas devastated by almost fifteen years of desperate war. As Vietnam veterans, we have tried to suggest the truth for decades. Now we have a compact, well-documented, and most informative little book we can suggest they read before enlisting. I can’t help but imagine a lot of heavy, fact-based conversations will result.

Samir Amin’s The Reawakening of the Arab World reviewed by Marx & Philosophy

February 20, 2024

Samir Amin’s latest book on the revolutionary foments in the Arab world, The Reawakening of the Arab World, provides a timely voice in contrast to the obfuscated discourse of the Western media regarding the Arab Spring and its ensuing political developments. Such discourse is marked by a pronounced contradiction that at once emphasizes the urgency of confronting ISIS (Daesh) as a global terrorist threat while simultaneously decrying the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria…. Amin’s analysis cuts against ideological reactions of this kind with a detailed historical and social examination of the concrete situation in this region, and shows, primarily with regard to Egypt and Syria, how Western imperialism has throughout the 20th century aimed at stifling the modernization of the Arab world.