Monthly Review Press

Pelf from workers’ hides–Truthout on Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

In recent decades, as U.S. corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to save money on wages, GM, H&M, Apple and dozens of other companies established elaborate supply chains in Asia, Mexico and Latin America, where workers earn pennies per hour. These chains are geographically expansive networks organized by foreign companies to produce semi-finished goods in different places before final assembly for huge global corporations....

New! “How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day”

February 20, 2024

Few authors are able to write cogently in both the scientific and the economic spheres. Even fewer possess the intellectual scope needed to address science and economics at a macro as well as a micro level. But Paul Cockshott, using the dual lenses of Marxist economics and technological advance, has managed to pull off a stunningly acute critical perspective of human history, from pre-agricultural societies to the present. In How the World Works, Cockshott connects scientific, economic, and societal strands to produce a sweeping and detailed work of historical analysis....

Erasing the crime of poverty: January Magazine reviews Seth Donnelly’s “The Lie of Global Prosperity”

February 20, 2024

“Seth Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, released in paperback late last year, is a methodical examination of how the World Bank spins its number crunching to cover up the extent of global poverty. Donnelly bolsters his analysis with on-the-ground reporting from numerous fact-finding trips to Haiti; the descriptions of what he found there effectively show how World Bank support for unjust governments plays out on the ground in underdeveloped nations...

Socialism and the Failures of Capitalism: Counterpunch on SR 2020’s “Beyond Market Dystopia”

February 20, 2024

To define a workable socialism, it’s best first to lay out what’s wrong with capitalism. Nancy Fraser’s excellent essay in Beyond Market Dystopia does just this, and these wrongs are three: injustice, irrationality and unfreedom. Injustice inheres in the exploitation of labor and theft of its surplus value. Irrationality exists in capitalism’s built-in economic crises. Unfreedom derives from social inequality and class power and also from tyranny in the work-place...

New! “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

February 20, 2024

On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors—streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers—fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this without police – and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why....

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.

Capitalism and ecological theft: This is Hell! debriefs John Bellamy Foster on “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

A few days ago, Chuck Mertz, host of This is Hell!, a weekly radio longform political interview program emanating from Chicago, phoned John Bellamy Foster, author, with Brett Clark, of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift to discuss the many, devastating ways that “capitalism has ruined our relationship with nature.

“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….

New! “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift”

February 20, 2024

In The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, departing from much previous scholarship, adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth....

The shattering of two worldviews: History Ireland on Helena Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Professor Helena Sheehan is internationally known as one of Ireland’s leading left-wing intellectuals. Her book Marxism and the philosophy of science: a critical history, first published in 1985, is the classic work on its subject and is still in print. She has now written her autobiography, covering the first part of her life from the 1940s to the 1980s...