Monthly Review Press

Author Eve Ottenberg reviews Seth Donnelly’s “The Lie of Global Prosperity”

February 20, 2024

Neoliberals love to quote the World Bank’s rosy statistics about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Unfortunately, those statistics are skewed and manipulated to the point of outright prevarication, as Seth Donnelly demonstrates in his book, The Lie of Global Prosperity. He quotes a breathless World Bank press release, ‘soon 90 percent of the world’s population will live on $1.90 a day or more’…

Op-Ed News: Gerald Horne discusses “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, noted historian and prolific author, discusses one of his recent books, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism with Jeff J. Brown on OpEdNews.com

Caribbean Quarterly reviews Jane Franklin’s “Cuba and the U.S. Empire”

February 20, 2024

In this new edition, Franklin calls for persons to be a little more circumspect about the motivations for the ‘Cuban Thaw’, as it is known in the US. This is because Cuba-US relations are not simply a product of the Cold War, or a relict thereof; they are a barometer of American imperial politics since the 18th century. And as US imperialism continues to develop, attention to the rapprochement strategy is required, lest one overlook the changing social pacts and geo-political currents to which they are attuned....

Marx & Philosophy looks at “Trump in the White House”–modestly hoping that looming tragedy turns into farce

February 20, 2024

‘The only conceivable answer today to cascading planetary catastrophe is a broad-based ecological and social revolution, in which the population mobilizes to protect the future of humanity: a revolutionary war for the planet’...

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...

“Kamala Harris, Another Establishment Candidate”: Laurence Shoup, via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

Much of Harris’s early political history is obscure, but we do know that she was an unknown 29-year-old lawyer in the early 1990s when her career was kick-started through a romantic relationship with master politico Willie Brown...

“What capitalism needs are human automata”–AUR reviews “Miseducating for the Global Economy”

February 20, 2024

Gerald Coles’ Miseducating for the Global Economy takes a critical look at what we are told by people who hardly ever enter a classroom but are called educational experts or educational policy makers, and politicians, the corporate media, and state officials… And then there are right-wing think tanks, CEOs, businesspeople, and rafts of capitalism’s little helpers….

How Jazz Survived White Supremacy: Gerald Horne talks to Truthout about “Jazz and Justice”

February 20, 2024

Certainly, being a ‘jazz’ musician in the first decades of the 20th century was probably the most dangerous profession in the arts and, along with coal mining, one of the most dangerous jobs of all. Inhaling cigarette smoke in dank clubs, being plied with alcohol and other controlled substances by unscrupulous bosses of clubs and record labels alike, being attacked violently by racist ‘fans’

Ian Angus on the Politics of Ecosocialism, via REBEL

February 20, 2024

Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about capitalism’s destruction of the natural world, including river and urban pollution, and the degradation of the soil that all life depends on. For them, the word ‘socialism’ included those concerns and the need to overcome them. But in the 20th Century, most socialist organisations treated such matters as secondary...

“Something we hardly find in biographies”–Heinrich’s “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society” reviewed by The News on Sunday

February 20, 2024

Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx captures what most biographies reduce merely to a background mention: contemporary conflicts, struggles and disputes that engaged Marx at the time when he was writing as well as his complex relationships with a varied range of friends and opponents….