Monthly Review Press

Labor can be used to create wealth for others…or to create life (Work Work Work in ‘Truthout’)

Labor can be used to create wealth for others…or to create life (Work Work Work in ‘Truthout’)

On this Labor Day, perhaps it is time for all members of the world’s working class, to ask themselves, why is work so often a “torment,” an “affliction,” done under “compulsion”? Why does it feel as if our bosses are “persecuting” us? Why does it wreck our bodies? Why does it seem so meaningless? It certainly doesn’t have to be and was not for most of our time on Earth....

WATCH! MR CONVERSATIONS: Capitalism in the Anthropocene by John Bellamy Foster (Plus: EXCERPTS)

WATCH! MR CONVERSATIONS: Capitalism in the Anthropocene by John Bellamy Foster (Plus: EXCERPTS)

...For many, willing to resign humanity to its “fate,” the idea of a way out of our current dilemma, fundamentally altering society in order to avoid the socioecological chasm before us, will undoubtedly sound utopian. But utopia, a pun coined in the sixteenth century by Thomas More meaning both “nowhere” and “good place,” and therefore often seen as representing a kind of dream state or wishful projection into the future, loses its idealistic connotation in the context of a planetary dystopia where catastrophe, measured against historical precedents, has now become normal and threatens to become irreversible on a planetary scale, due to the inherent apocalyptic tendencies of the current mode of production...

Grappling with “Capital’s” entirety: Not just for first-time readers (Heinrich reviewed by ‘Marx & Philosophy Review of Books’)

Grappling with “Capital’s” entirety: Not just for first-time readers (Heinrich reviewed by ‘Marx & Philosophy Review of Books’)

Heinrich’s close attention to the original German, contrary to many anglophone scholars, is another element of his textual approach that strengthens the accuracy of the interpretation.....to say that "How to Read Marx’s ‘Capital’" is not only for first-time readers may be to state the obvious. It is a commentary that is straightforward in its exposition and indispensable for beginners, yet still challenges those who have already long dedicated themselves to a study of 'Capital'....

Antifascism on the “home front” (Horne and the Criterion Collection)

Antifascism on the “home front” (Horne and the Criterion Collection)

During the Red Scare, a telling phrase came to describe some who had been clamoring for more demonstrative anti-Hitler manifestations before the U.S. entered the war in late 1941: “premature antifascists.” Outside a narrow wartime period, antifascist convictions were now seen from a postwar vantage as suspect, evidence of Communist loyalty. Now forgotten is that there was an offshoot of this tendency: one whose adherents we might call “premature antiracists”....