Monthly Review Press

35% Off November Book of the Month! José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology

February 20, 2024

José Carlos Mariátegui, a creative Marxist thinker and activist from Peru, who was born in 1894 and died in 1930, was once not widely known in the English-speaking world. Over the last few decades, however, more and more people have learned about his life and works, and in 2011, MR Press was proud to publish a comprehensive anthology of his writings, edited and translated by the scholars Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker. Now, we're pleased to present José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology as our November book of the month. Receive 35% off when you use the coupon code BOM1114 at checkout.

NEW! Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age by Ursula Huws

February 20, 2024

Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet.

In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself in Kirkus Reviews

February 20, 2024

Marsh shares his affection for Walt Whitman in this gentle, thoughtful consideration of the poet's relevance to 21st-century America. Beset by moral malaise in his 30s, the author "suffered from fully-grown doubts, not just growing doubts, about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country." Whitman's insights on death, money, sex and democracy buoyed his spirits .... Marsh confesses his love for the legendary poet, and by the end of this insightful homage, readers are likely to feel the same.

NEW! Transforming Classes: Socialist Register 2015 edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo

February 20, 2024

This 51st annual Socialist Register completes the investigation of class formation and class strategies on a global scale begun with last year's volume. Deploying an understanding of class as an historical social process—rather than an abstract sociological category or statistical artifact—the essays here investigate the concrete ways that working classes are being made and remade in the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity, and authoritarian governments. Taking stock of the changing balance of class forces as well as old and new forms of workplace, household and political organization, they uncover the class strategies being debated and adapted in different zones of the world.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

February 20, 2024

Wealthy and powerful countries have a variety of mechanisms available to them to control the fates of peoples in poor countries. These are not mutually exclusive, and most of poor countries have experienced more than one of these types of interventions. The use of propaganda, targeting populations both in the periphery and the metropole, was studied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988, and since. The power of financial institutions in controlling the economies of dependent countries has been documented by many scholars, among them, for Haiti, Paul Farmer. US interventions specifically designed for electoral processes through State Department–sponsored organizations and others (called "democracy promotion") have been analyzed by William Robinson and other scholars, including Nicholas Guilhot.

Save Our Unions reviewed in LaborOnline

February 20, 2024

Labor law is outdated and rotten in the US, corporations have an inordinate amount of power, so it is rare that unions win or even strike these days. Solid activist leadership in our unions is rare in these last decades of concessionary bargaining and the sustained war on the working class. The lack of a class perspective by many Americans makes them susceptible to the ugliest sorts of manipulation against their own interests. Steve Early has seen much of it and described it in a clear-eyed fashion in his latest book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review 2013). It should be read by unionists and their supporters and the more than 60% of Americans who pollsters say would like to be unionized.

Sept. 25: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaks in New York City

February 20, 2024

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a long-time contributor to and friend of Monthly Review, will be discussing her new book An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States at Bluestockings Books in New York City, on Thursday, September 25, 7pm.