Monthly Review Press

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed in The Bullet

February 20, 2024

Drawing upon first-hand interviews with both paramilitaries, elites and their victims, and with corroboration provided by thousands of U.S. State Department documents (obtained through Freedom of Information Act document requests), Sprague's incisive contribution to the historical record makes it all too clear how the U.S. government and a collection of local elites have consistently undermined democracy in Haiti – from the nineteenth century right through to the present day.

The Endless Crisis reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

The Great Recession has ended, unlike slow/no growth. For a deeper sense of why, get a copy of The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney. The duo of scholars and professors connect the dots in a radical critique of modern-day capitalism. Theirs is a rigorous analysis, empirical and theoretical, of the twin trends of slowing growth and growing tumult.

NEW! Faces of Latin America: Fourth Edition

February 20, 2024

Faces of Latin America has sold more than 50,000 copies since it first appeared in 1991, and is widely considered to be the best available introduction in English to the economies, politics, demography, social structures, environment and cultures of Latin America. This fourth edition updates the book for 2012 and covers the most pressing issues facing Latin America today.

NEW! Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, edited by Clairmont Chung

February 20, 2024

This book presents a moving and insightful portrait of the great scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney through the words of academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew him intimately or felt his influence. These informal recollections and reflections demonstrate why Rodney is such a widely admired figure throughout the world, especially in poor countries and among oppressed peoples everywhere.

The Endless Crisis reviewed on Systemic Disorder blog

February 20, 2024

The Endless Crisis is a welcome, and very needed, departure from the usual apologetics for capitalist outcomes. Professors Foster and McChesney provide a single source for understanding the present economic impasse, laying out with devastating precision the reasons for the economic crisis, the inevitability of crisis, the inequality and instability inherent in the capitalist system, and the need to move to a more humane system.

Revolutionary Doctors reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

I live in California, where a fledgling public health insurance marketplace is ushering a new gold rush of sorts. A driving force is of course President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Under such reform, capital cheers when the commodity of health care grows. A different kind of health-care system concerns author Steve Brouwer. In Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World's Conception of Health Care, he details that alternate way ahead for medicine and people to improve social equity and solidarity. It's moving ahead now in Latin America. Brouwer's book teems with his first-hand accounts from a village in Monte Carmelo. His focus amplifies the model of de-commoditized health care that rules the roost stateside.

Wisconsin Uprising reviewed in Against the Current

February 20, 2024

MORE THAN A year has passed since the mass protests of February-March 2011, at Madison and elsewhere across Wisconsin, erupted in response to Republican Governor Scott Walker's effort to bust the state's public employee unions. The three-week occupation of the State Capitol building and truly massive outdoor demos in the surrounding streets drew the attention of the entire country and much of the world. Ongoing rallies, with crowds sometimes numbering well over a hundred thousand, drew organized labor and the unorganized, private and public sector workers, high school and college kids, farmers, the elderly and the young, retirees, the unemployed and recently returned veterans, and whole families with kids and grandkids — from every city, town and county in the state.

Occupy Consciousness: a video lecture on the work of István Mészáros

February 20, 2024

These videos were recorded at a lecture on May 19, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They feature Irv Kurki, coordinator for essential discussions of advanced theory, discussing "Capital's (Dis)organizing Systems and the Socialist Alternatives"; and Doug Enaa Greene, member of the Kasama Project and an activist at Occupy Boston, on "Critiquing Capital from Capital's Viewpoint: Meszaros's Critique of Sartre and the Occupy Movement."

Mészáros discussion in Boston

February 20, 2024

Join Irving Kurki and Doug Enaa Greene for an installment of the ongoing "Occupy Consciousness" lecture series, where they discuss the work of István Mészáros and its application to our time and the Occupy Movement.

Jeb Sprague's Op-Ed in the Miami Herald

February 20, 2024

Haiti's government is making plans to revive the country's disbanded army, an institution guilty of many of the worst crimes ever perpetrated in the country. At the same time, special police units have been used to drive earthquake victims out of camps. While civil society and grassroots organizations in Haiti are campaigning against a return to the era of Duvalierist repression, people in the United States should be made aware of our government's long history with that country's military and security forces.