Monthly Review Press

Progressive Populist + SocialistAction = 2 reviews of “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism”

February 20, 2024

"Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads..."
¶ "The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…"

Gerald Horne: Africans See China as Counterweight to US and Europe

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, author of Jazz and Justice and the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse, recently talked to Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, on Black Agenda Radio, about how Africa, in contrast to the United States, tends to see China's role in geopolitics...

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....

“Carefully crafted and surprising book”: People & Nature reviews Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Kohei Saito’s book shows us how Karl Marx evolved as an ecological thinker. It is a pioneering scrutiny of the evolution of ideas, the genealogy of terms, lines of debates and kinds of evidence, from the 1840s to about 1870. The book started as a German doctoral thesis, grounded in hitherto unpublished notebooks by Marx, but also drawing on Saito’s wide erudition. Putting paid to one set of debates, the book generates new ones...

Regarding ecological imperialism–Freedom Socialist reviews “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Saito delves deeply into Marx’s notebooks, the first to do so. He shows, time and again, that Marx was deeply aware of the unsustainable attack by capitalism upon the land itself. ¶ I have had a gut feeling about that since I first read Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels in my teens: that alienation from the land is a key underpinning of capitalism….

New! “Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living”

February 20, 2024

How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living....

“Timely anachronism”–New West Indian Guide reviews “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

This latest work by Gerald Horne, born January 3, 1949 and still producing history monographs at a rate of knots, inspired me to wonder why he is not better known in Britain. ...

Health care beyond neoliberalism?–Social Theory & Health reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

February 20, 2024

That capitalist medicine prioritises the generation of surplus value over the health of populations should be obvious to any critical student or scholar in the field, but where Waitzkin and colleagues depart from this basic assumption is in demonstrating the political economy of health in the current phase of neoliberalism where, for example, the processes of financialization have eclipsed material production….

Lying to pretend things are OK: ResoluteReader looks at “The Lie of Global Prosperity”

February 20, 2024

The end of 2019 has seen a growing ‘global revolt’ in countries as varied as Hong Kong, Chile, Iraq, Ecuador, Catalonia and Lebanon. Seth Donnelly's new book is not about these revolts, but is an explanation of the dynamics that have driven the impoverishment of the Global South and how the ruling class seeks to justify things....

Victor Grossman: From Harvard to East Berlin, via Jacobin

February 20, 2024

The first book I wrote was published in East Berlin and talked about my life in the United States right up until the first days of my defection to the GDR in 1952. It was called The Way Across the Border. The funny thing is, some people in the GDR bought it thinking that I was talking about going in the other direction—they thought it would help them jump the Wall from East to West...