Category: Monthly Review Press /

Monthly Review Needs Your Help!

February 20, 2024

The challenges we face here and now underscore the need to support independent, nonprofit publishing. Monthly Review and MR Press give people the tools to understand why the economy works the way it does, why our government fails to serve the people, why the environment is in crisis, why this country chooses the leaders it does.
We exist because there is a community that values our work. We have no deep pockets, no wealthy contributors. We operate on a shoestring budget. Please help us continue our work in the coming year by making a donation today.

“We Told Him All”: Alan Wieder talks to PopMatters about Studs Terkel

February 20, 2024

At this writing we Americans find ourselves at the ass end of 2016 after a slog of an election year in which we elected a bankrupted reality TV star as the president elect… The people of the United States have spoken and they do not want progressive, liberal ideas at this time. ¶ For the rest of us, Studs Terkel—the great oral historian, champion of the common man, political activist, radio host, and listener—couldn’t be more relevant now. Author Alan Wieder recently released a timely and engaging biography, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation. Mr. Wieder and I engaged in some conversation about Terkel’s life and work.

“Scandalous and needs to be talked about”: Big Farms Make Big Flu reviewed by Antipode

February 20, 2024

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, again. In the autumn of 2016, several cases of avian influenza H5N8 were detected across Europe. Some cases were dead wild birds, others were domestic birds. Several farms had to execute culls in the ten thousands…. A few days earlier, the US president Barack Obama visited Germany for the last time during his presidency. During his visit, in a joint paper with German chancellor Angela Merkel, he analysed the importance of transatlantic relations. One line stood out and was repeated throughout media headlines: ‘we will never return to a pre-globalization economy’. So what has that to do with dead birds? ¶ Everything–if you dare to read Rob Wallace’s new book.

“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