Category: Monthly Review Press /

anarkismo.net reviews The Necessity of Social Control

February 20, 2024

“István Mészáros, a well-known Marxist theorist, has material which can be interesting to anarchists. He has an insightful analysis of the current stage of capitalism and the state. He makes Marx’s ‘withering away of the state’ central to his program, and he rejects electoral party politics. But paradoxically, he also supports the late Hugo Chavez’s attempted use of the Venezuelan state to move to socialism. How can we understand this and respond to it?…”

Wall Street’s Think Tank: Why “the ruling class can never be passive” — via Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014 400 pp, $34 cloth, ISBN 9781583675519 By Laurence H. Shoup Reviewed by Dominic Alexander... READ MORE

New! The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? by John Marciano

February 20, 2024

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years—through November 11, 2025—commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 3 million Vietnamese—soldiers, parents, grandparents, children—also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated.

Reconstructing Lenin reviewed in Links

February 20, 2024

With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, and the seeming defeat of “Marxism-Leninism” in 1991, it appeared we could at last bury Lenin. And certainly, who will mourn for the death of a Lenin encased in granite monuments with his words turned into a dogmatic religion to legitimise the Eastern Bloc regimes? ¶ However, there is another Lenin who remains very much alive. This Lenin has been unearthed in recent years with the “Lenin renaissance”. Different scholars and political activists such as Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Anderson, to name just a few, have explored what remains very much alive in Lenin…. ¶ Now, to this distinguished list, we can add the name of Tamás Krausz with the release of his magnificent book…

August 30, Alan Wieder launches Studs Terkel at Portland OR’s Broadway Books: foretold on KBOO radio

February 20, 2024

Alan Wieder talks to community radio KBOO‘s Desiree Hellegers on the Old Mole Variety Hour about Studs Terkel and the Broadway Books launch—August 30, 7:00 p.m.— of Wieder‘s brand new book, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation.

“Slaughter in Vietnam Haunts Bob Kerrey’s Appointment to Fulbright University”—John Marciano via Truthout.org

February 20, 2024

The struggle over memory and truth about the Vietnam War continues. It reemerged in May when President Obama announced the opening of Fulbright University in Vietnam, and that Bob Kerrey would chair the board of trustees. Fulbright is the first private university in Vietnam, with ties to the Kennedy Center at Harvard and the US State Department. What does this recent appointment and the controversy surrounding it teach us about the War in Vietnam?

“Enormous Potential for Fresh Revolts”: Imperialism in the 21st Century reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Over the last forty years, global capitalism has increasingly been shaped by the core tenets of neoliberalism. The neoliberal counter-revolution emerged as a response to the return of economic crisis in the 1970s, and to the power of working class and anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It was geared towards the interests of wealthy and corporate elites, at the expense of the vast majority of working class and oppressed people worldwide. The divisions between the 1% and the 99% have become ever more acute, with the most extraordinary and ostentatious wealth for a tiny elite alongside hardship, insecurity and poverty for many people.