Monthly Review Press

Why the presidential debates aren’t about imperialism: The Progressive Populist looks at Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

Imperialism does not play out much in the 2020 presidential race. That says more about US corporate power over the two political parties and other institutions such as the new media, e.g., Comcast owning MSNBC. ¶ Meanwhile, as the US has deindustrialized, 79 percent of the globe’s industrial workers toiled in the Global South in 2010, over double the figure in 1950. The fruits of their exploited labor sell in the Global North

Action Guide for Green New Deal Advocates: Science for the People reviews “Creating an Ecological Society”

February 20, 2024

“Creating an Ecological Society is an important and timely book for two reasons. First, the authors merge two rich areas of discourse—environmental conservation and anti-capitalism—in a seamless narrative that underscores both the urgency of our times and the opportunity of the moment. Second, authors Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams describe how creating an ecological society based on a set of shared values can directly improve the lived experience of individuals across the globe...

Who Should We Blame for Coronavirus?–Rob Wallace has some answers…

February 20, 2024

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, explains, via The American Scholar, that if we want to understand global outbreaks of infectious disease, you have to look at global agriculture....

How capitalism interlocks with imperialism: Counterfire reviews Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism...

When Solidarity Mattered: CounterPunch considers “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

February 20, 2024

This is a special book, bearing an almost sacred topic for all those interested in the history of the American labor and the Left. The vibrant, pre-1920 Socialist Party, waxing strong and confident until struck down for its resistance to the US entry into the First World War, stood for a larger and more diverse radicalism. including Wobblies, quasi-wobblies. labor and cultural radicals of no certain description and of several generations. They had in common the sense that dramatic change in society was possible, perhaps inevitable....

“From Commune to Capitalism” reviewed by Science & Society

February 20, 2024

This book is expressive of a new wave of scholarly reassessments of China’s transition from its socialist past to capitalist present. From a Chinese perspective, it has not much in common with the canonical CCP narratives widely circulated in printed media and Party phone apps, as Zhun Xu employs a “betrayal of the revolution” rhetoric that pinpoints ruptures between a socialist China under Mao Zedong’s leadership and a capitalist China headed by Deng Xiaoping and afterwards ...

Unprecedented attention to history, geography, background figures: Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières reviews “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

The first volume of Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx, if any indication of the two volumes yet to come, signals a genuine event in the understanding of Marx and his work. With it, the terrain for understanding all aspects of Marx’s life has likely changed fundamentally....

Intellectual rigor + intensely engaged activism = Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

The backward and repressive nature of the 1950s in regard to rights and opportunities for women has been widely exposed, not least through cultural representations like ‘Mad Men’, Doris Day films, and every single domestic appliance or kitchen advert from that decade and beyond. Women are housewives and mothers, slim and glamorous with high heels and frilly aprons. It’s easy to laugh now at these caricatures which hid an uncomfortable and often very unhappy reality. But it would never have occurred to me that in contrast to the life of a 1950s housewife, a bright and highly intelligent young girl would choose, in preference to that fate, to become a nun. But so was the case with Helena Sheehan, born into 1940s USA.

Against the Current looks at “Voices of Latin America” and “Making the Revolution”

February 20, 2024

“The Inca emperor Manco Inca started a rebellion against the Spanish Conquistadors in 1536 in Cusco. Although ultimately driven into the remote jungles of Vilcabamba, he and his forces were able to establish a liberated zone and declare a neo-Inca State that lasted for several decades until the execution of his son Túpac Amaru in 1572....”

“Passionate and entertaining account of GDR Socialism”: People’s Voice reviews “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

Thirty-one years ago the Berlin Wall came down and the working class in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, voted to merge with capitalist West Germany. In A Socialist Defector: from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee veteran journalist Victor Grossman provides insight into why the GDR’s 41-year experiment with socialism did not last. He describes the ups and downs of the former GDR, spicing it up with many interesting details of life before and after the Berlin Wall….