In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
Our collective humanity very much depends on the natural world, for joy, for comfort, and for sheer survival. Nature is full of complex and dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with our societies. The natural world is not simply active in some abstract sense; its collective physical interactions guide and forge many fundamental features of human societies and civilizations. Humanity does not exist on a magical pedestal above the rest of reality; we are just one slice in a grand continuum of physical
we’re born with the wit to master Advanced Drone Escape 101 and How to Breathe Through Dust 202. By the time this war began, I was already a seasoned student. I had passed the tests five times already, miraculously surviving five destructive wars in just 25 years. So I was familiar with the drill: grab your documents, your children and whatever food you can carry, and run. But knowing the drill doesn’t make it easier. | more…
Losurdo provides us with an ideological map of opportunist Continental left-wing philosophy. The Western Marxists that he criticizes are the Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas); French theory ( Alain Badiou; Michel Foucault); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of Empire); Hannah Arendt; Slavoj Zizek; Ernst Bloch; Norberto Bobbio; Leon Trotsky and his disciples (including Perry Anderson) and others. Losurdo demonstrates the influence of Western Marxism on such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who did not wholly succumb to it…. | more…
….and the “normal” body, if you want to use that term, is the one which can keep up with the productivity of machinery, of factory life. And what Marx argued in fact was that in most cases, the productivity of machinery could outpace that of the ‘normal’ body, if you want to put it that way…” | more…
Excerpted from:
CHAPTER 8: Healthcare under Capitalism
Fundamental to the Marxist method is dialectics, with change understood as emerging from the interaction between objects and phenomena. The health status of any individual arises from the dialectical interaction between the materialism of their body and the materialism of the social context within which the body is situated. The body has its own biological structural organization, governed by its own internal biological forces. Without doubt there exists an expected way in which the body functions, reflecting its inherent structural operation, which,
It is true that what Losurdo leaves us is not an encyclopedia nor a comforting panacea. Instead, like Virgil leading Dante through the inferno, he offers to help light the way as our guide through this capitalist imperialist hellscape. Like Virgil, however, Losurdo cannot see this journey through for us. | more…
….cites a popular and influential book by a self-proclaimed Marxist that invites us to “change the world without taking power.” “Here,” declares Losurdo, “the self-dissolution of Western Marxism ends up departing from the terrain of politics and settling in the land of religion.” Losurdo is clear that “changing the world” involves an intensification of anti-colonial struggle, and an ongoing renewal of Marxism, not limited to any hemisphere. | more…
Barrett has always been close to the hearts of Paraguayan radicals, who, along with his progeny, have kept his memory alive. And he is known throughout the Southern Cone of South America, though his work has suffered long periods of relative neglect there. However, there has been a resurgence of interest in his life and work. We hope that with the publication of this first English translation of his major work, which includes his powerful set of essays The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests, the life and works of Rafael Barrett will inspire readers in the English-speaking world. | more…
Despite the explicitly national flavor of its title, the core themes that run through ‘Paraguayan Sorrow’ resonate broadly in space and time. No doubt thanks to his international education and background, Barrett was able to quote, compare, and draw inspiration from writers and case studies from around the world…. | more…
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and
One of the titles Fitzgerald gave to his novel—he was never satisfied with any of them—was ‘Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.’ The title juxtaposes landscape (ash heaps) and humans (millionaires), and its preposition, Among, implies a shared world, one that includes both setting and character. And so it is. Or was. Until the city turned to its master builder to clean up the mess—a master builder whose reading of ‘The Great Gatsby’ would inspire him to redeem the wasteland. | more…
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
