Monthly Review Press

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 Key to China’s Future Is Its Past: “From Commune to Capitalism” reviewed by Against the Current

February 20, 2024

From Commune to Capitalism disputes the long-established claim that the decollectivization of Maoist-era peasant communes was better for the economy and an initiative wholly championed by the peasantry...

“The War in Eastern Ukraine May be Coming to an End But Do Americans Care?”–Kuzmarov via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

Ukraine’s newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a “first step” in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians…

“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….

Marx & Philosophy reviews “From Commune to Capitalism”

February 20, 2024

What is remarkable about China’s agrarian reforms is that, despite their pivotal role in ending socialist production, some on the left have offered quite positive evaluations. ¶ Zhun Xu is a skeptic of these accounts….

“Magisterial Biography”: Morning Star reviews Heinrich’s “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

In a short appendix to this first of what is to be a multi-volume biography of Karl Marx — which is bound to become a referential touchstone for any subsequent treatment of his life and works — Michael Heinrich examines how biographical writing is possible today and the reader should start with this essay in order to recognise the intentions and detailed scope of his treatment of Marx through his childhood and youth from 1818 to 1841...