On March 11, Michael D. Yates, economist, labor educator, and author, talked to WRFG Labor Forum hosts Dianne Mathiowetz and Paul McLennan about his latest book, Can the Working Class Change the World? | more…

Recently, Zillah Eisenstein, author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution–forthcoming in May–delivered an address titled “Personal and Political Feminisms: Finding Understandings Amid the Chaos.” | more…

Only People Make Their Own History is the first ever posthumous publication of Amin’s work. It includes ten of Amin’s most important essays published in the 21st century, and an introduction by renowned Marxist literary critic, Aijaz Ahmad…. | more…

Radical political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential. Monthly Review Press is honored to publish this volume, culled from the Monthly Review magazine, of ten of Samir Amin’s most significant essays written in the twenty-first century. … | more…

The story of bio-fuels is a moral tale of how marketised, profit-driven responses to climate change will both fail to solve the problem and cause unconsidered damaging outcomes…. ¶ In The Biofuels Deception,Okbazghi Yohannes traces the industry’s beginnings back to the Bush administration and the idea that the world was reaching ‘peak oil’…. | more…

The book by the philosopher Helena Sheehan follows by and large the typical structure of Greek tragedy. Sheehan analyses the five key years (from 2012 to 2016) and faces of Syriza from the period of counter-hegemonic movement showing Syriza preparing to catch power and giving voice to a society of anger…  | more…

Why would an American girl-child, born into a good, Irish-Catholic family in the thick of the McCarthy era—a girl who, when she came of age, entered a convent—morph into an atheist, feminist, and Marxist? The answer is in Helena Sheehan’s fascinating account of her journey from her 1940s and 1950s beginnings, into the turbulent 1960s, when the Vietnam War, black power, and women’s liberation rocked her bedrock assumptions and prompted a volley of life-upending questions… | more…

The book’s title poses a daunting question: Can the Working Class Change the World? Then, in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages, it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we pored over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction…. | more…

The two works considered here take on very different aspects of the general environmental crisis we face. In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright consider the political consequences of a continued failure to prevent catastrophic climate change, whereas Holt-Giménez’s Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism considers the food system’s role in and distortion by capitalism. This difference in approach makes it all the more notable that both start from the assumption that on their particular issue, the Left has failed… | more…

D’Mello’s tour de force is both a history of modern India and its ‘rotten liberal democracy,’ including the left’s challenge to it, and a fine-grained look at India’s Maoist movement. It combines a sharp historical account with critical analysis, along with some original theoretical insights… | more…

The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman—a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker—left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate—i.e., the Soviets—landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic…. | more…