Monthly Review Press

“Colossal intellectual undertaking”: Irish Marxist Review on John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature”

February 20, 2024

"John Bellamy Foster is a U.S.-based writer and lecturer whose works are essential reading for all revolutionaries and environmentalists. Over two decades, Foster has produced an immensely important body of work, and alongside a small number of others (like Ian Angus), has clarified and rescued Marxist thinking on key environmental issues in the age of climate catastrophe..."

“Stop Centering White People”–Zillah Eisenstein via Portside

February 20, 2024

"Stop centering white people—there are so many other newer faces to see and they are already here..." Zillah Eisenstein, author, most recently, of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, has, in the wake of the presidential election, written "The New US: While Calling Out Trump White Women" for Portside, a leftist news aggregator and alternative communication medium...

A long ecological revolution? Marxist Left Review considers “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

New Year’s Eve 2019: 5,000 people on the beach at Mallacoota, Victoria, watch pitch-black skies turn a deep red as the bushfire approaches. They huddle, powerless against the fury of this climate change-fuelled nightmare. By March 2020, 33 people, one billion animals, 3,094 houses and over 17 million hectares of land had been destroyed in fires across Australia...

Eric Chester & Mitch Jeserich on the Suppression of Speech in WWI, with Implications for a Biden Presidency

February 20, 2024

Eric T. Chester, author of the recently released Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, talked to Mitch Jeserich, host of KPFA's Letters and Politics, about the legacy of dissent, what happens when the United States works to suppress it, and how this might play out in light of the oncoming Biden administration...

Crafting a revolutionary healthcare system–NACLA reviews 2 books on Cuban Health Care

February 20, 2024

The Right to Live in Health and Cuban Health Care, when read together, historicize Cuba’s pathbreaking medical system. ... While observers often focus on Cuba’s health infrastructure and policies, Rodríguez and Fitz instead emphasize consciousness and ideology. These two books show that throughout the twentieth century, Cubans voiced new demands and prioritized specific values, and, as a result, crafted a revolutionary healthcare system...

Left Socialist Blog reviews “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

“'A man dressed like Karl Marx' Michael Heinrich observes 'would hardly arouse attention walking through the streets of Paris of London today.' Some biographers assert that Marx was a product of a past epoch, the early 19th century 'increasingly distant from our age.' (Jonathan Sperber 2013) By contrast the first volume of a projected account of Marx’s life sees his reflections on the 'epochal rupture' that created modern capitalism, to be, if more arresting than his clothing, recognisably part of today’s world....”

“Walking through the door of a global clash”: ResoluteReader on “Dead Epidemiologists”

February 20, 2024

While I was recommending his earlier book, Wallace himself was being bombarded with requests for interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Out of that came this excellent new book. Dead Epidemiologists is a collection of material that grapples with the big questions around Covid-19 - its origins, the failure of capitalist governments to deal with it and the way the disease exacerbates existing social, political and economic fractures in society....

New! “Crisis and Predation: India, COVID-19, and Global Finance”

February 20, 2024

With the advent of COVID-19, India’s rulers imposed the world’s most stringent lockdown on an already depressed economy, dealing a body blow to the majority of India’s billion-plus population. Yet the Indian government’s spending to cushion the lockdown’s economic impact ranked among the world’s lowest in GDP terms, resulting in unprecedented unemployment and hardship. Crisis and Predation shows how this tight-fistedness stems from the opposition of global financial interests to any expansion of public spending by India, and that Indian rulers readily adhere to their guidance...

The inseparability of neocolonialism, racism & capitalism: UK’s Morning Star on “The Dawning of the Apocalypse”

February 20, 2024

"History continuously reminds us that racism and capitalism are two peas from the same pod. Those of a predominantly European descent wreak worldwide havoc, carrying out the much-fabled white man's burden, imposing themselves as ruling elites. Black lives still don't matter in many societies because the miserable claim of 'white supremacy' has been effortlessly intertwined with the neoreligion; capitalism...."

Preventing the next disease from escaping: CounterPunch reviews “Dead Epidemiologists”

February 20, 2024

Covid-19 comes from the primary forest, from bat caves. In a world without industrial agriculture encroaching on that forest, in a world without the corporatization of a wild-food industry, Covid-19 would probably never have left those caves. As it becomes endemic, it may become unstoppable. But not so the next pestilence. If we revamp our food production system now, maybe the pathogens lurking in primeval forest viral reservoirs will stay there...