Monthly Review Press

E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

The ‘left’ has been reborn many times over the last two centuries. Every renewal has carried with it traditions from past phases, with greater or lesser degrees of continuity, while establishing new relations and alliances in response to the changing structures of capitalism. This can be seen in the transition between radical Jacobinism and early forms of socialism, or between the Chartist movement and later nineteenth-century trade-union and socialist movements, and in other moments in the history of working-class politics. E. P. Thompson was a figure who both recaptured these transitions in his historical writing, and participated in a major re-orientation of left politics after the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

Race to Revolution reviewed by Counterfire

Race to Revolution reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne’s new volume casts light on a ‘special relationship’ which is often ignored or forgotten: that of the United States and pre-revolutionary Cuba. Horne, a Marxist historian whose work has covered a multiplicity of themes including race, empire, revolution and communism, has been committed to the study of narratives and topics excluded from the (particularly US) mainstream. He describes the manner in which academic historians have generally dealt with communist history, for instance, as ‘incredibly biased, one-sided, deeply influenced by the conservative drift of the nation’.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed by Counterfire

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

You are almost certainly reading this review on a computer screen, on a mobile device, tablet, laptop or PC. It's probably one of many, many things you’ll read onscreen today. Some of your uses of new technology will be for leisure, recreation and education, and some will be work-related. The information, communication and technology industry (ICT) is all around us, almost like air or water.

NEW! The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree

NEW! The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree

February 20, 2024

Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy decision that contaminates drinking water, and they may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasive occurrence of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the human world, particularly in a modern era. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful.

New! The Socialist Imperative by Michael Lebowitz

New! The Socialist Imperative by Michael Lebowitz

February 20, 2024

Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed by Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed by Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have recently identified a political point of entry that has the potential to galvanize wide public support and focus political discussion and debate on the most glaring (historical) weaknesses of capitalism as a mode of production and to begin to nudge public awareness toward the deep contradictory ontology that is capitalism.

Reconstructing Lenin reviewed by International Socialism

Reconstructing Lenin reviewed by International Socialism

February 20, 2024

Reconstructing Lenin is a thoughtful and compelling study of Lenin. Tamás Krausz reveals Lenin as an activist revolutionary whose thoughts were shaped by immediate political events but who also at the same time never strayed far from a coherent theoretical framework. As a work of scholarship it deserves to be up there with Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.

Race in Cuba reviewed in Science & Society

Race in Cuba reviewed in Science & Society

February 20, 2024

Race in contemporary Cuba is a delicate and hotly contested issue. What most agree is that pre-1959 Cuba was characterized by a stark racial inequality which, rooted in a relatively recent history of slavery (abolished only in 1886), was addressed after January 1959 by legally eliminating its more evident institutional manifestations, by a social program which particularly benefited those at the bottom of the old social structure, and by a mass emigration which initially was predominantly (83.5%) white. More recently, we know that after the 1990s’ traumatic crisis (following the Soviet and socialist bloc collapse) and the unprecedented changes to counter that crisis (including increased tourism and toleration of the U. S. dollar), inequality partly returned, as remittances from relatives abroad disproportionately benefited whites.

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