Monthly Review Press

From the Square: Michael Joseph Roberto talks about “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

February 20, 2024

The alt-right is on the move everywhere. Ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists, religious fanatics and other retrograde political elements--all are rising steadily from the ranks of societies across the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia. Inflicting hatred and violence on their respective populations, its constituents target all who seek to expand human rights... In short, what the alt-right seeks is a world ruled by those who are opposed to the progress of humanity itself....

“Setting the record straight”–The Real Democracy Movement reviews “Jazz & Justice”

February 20, 2024

Jazz is enjoying a new wave of popularity. A gig by Kamasi Washington, the last musician named in Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice, attracts big crowds, and his recordings make big sales…

Not afraid to challenge “facts” about Marx’s life: Socialist Review on “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked….

“More liberty than bourgeois society can reach”: Socialism & Democracy reviews “Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell”

February 20, 2024

Ever since he died fighting for the Republican cause in Spain in February 1937, there has been a recurring critical debate about the work of Christopher Caudwell. Indeed, between 1950 and 1951 there was what came to be known as ‘the Caudwell controversy’ where leading members of the British Communist Party, of which Caudwell was a member, debated in the pages of The Modern Quarterly whether Caudwell was really an orthodox Marxist or just a bourgeois idealist....

Zillah Eisenstein: feminism, socialism, and the imperative of confronting white supremacy, via Out of Bounds

February 20, 2024

Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of political theory at Ithaca College and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently talked with Tish Perlman, host of Out of Bounds, a weekly radio show focusing on people living, working, and thinking outside the mainstream. In this interview, Zillah discusses the necessity to abolish pervasive white supremacy, her Communist upbringing, and how we should all just shut up about Trump...

NEW! “The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States”

February 20, 2024

“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites....

What the Fall of the Wall Really Meant: Workers World reviews Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

This Nov. 9, the world’s imperialists and big capitalists will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will fill the media, all too available to them, with lies claiming this event was a victory for democracy and freedom. They will be slandering the German Democratic Republic and all the good and progressive acts of the once-socialist part of Germany…

On being a ‘good ancestor’–Marx & Philosophy looks at “A Redder Shade of Green”

February 20, 2024

A Redder Shade of Green is one of the more grounded books I have encountered this year. Ian Angus’s concerns are earthly, practical, and immediate, all of which are virtues given how his eco-socialism stands in stark contra-distinction to neoliberal ecological reasoning...

“30 Years Later: Another View of the Fall of the Berlin Wall”–Victor Grossman, via Portside

February 20, 2024

Berlin — Media jubilation reaches a climax on November 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their ‘welcome present’ of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system....

“The Intellectual Development of Karl Marx”–Louis Proyect reviews vol. I of Michael Heinrich’s biography of Marx

February 20, 2024

Given the renewed attention to Karl Marx since the financial crisis of 2008, this biography will help us understand how his life and thought evolved….