Monthly Review Press

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’

Gerald Horne talks to Black Perspectives about “Jazz and Justice”

February 20, 2024

"I grew up in Jim Crow St. Louis with working class parents with roots in Mississippi. From an early age I recall a guitar in our house, that our father would pluck from time to time. Undoubtedly, my younger brother Marvin Horne—who has played with such giants as percussionists, Chico Hamilton and Elvin Jones, and as part of Aretha Franklin’s band just before she expired—was influenced to pick up this instrument because of its ubiquitous presence in our small house...."

Red Green Labour reviews “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” by Kohei Saito

February 20, 2024

This exceptionally clear and well-researched book is based on Saito’s dissertation, originally in German, and incorporates the results of his study of as-yet unpublished manuscripts and excerpt notebooks compiled during the last fifteen years of Marx’s life....

“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….

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...

Imperialism in a coffee cup: John Smith caffeinates Open Democracy

February 20, 2024

Even the debate on reparations for slavery and colonialism is framed in terms of correcting past wrongs, excluding any notion that imperialist plunder of nature and living labour continues apace in the modern ‘post-colonial’ world....

Britain’s Communist Review considers Victor Grossman’s “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

For most of history, there was no ‘Germany’ as such – just a ragbag of German-speaking states. In 1871, most of them unified into the German Empire (Austria stayed outside, together with Switzerland, where German is but one of the languages spoken). ¶ Germany came late to the capitalist table, and flexed its muscles in the early 20th century with the aim of becoming a major imperialist power. ...

Helena Sheehan: Radical Thinker, Radical Times–on KPFA’s Against the Grain

February 20, 2024

Helena Sheehan author, most recently, of Navigating the Zeitgeist: A Story of the Cold War, the New Left, Irish Republicanism, and International Communism, talks to C.S. Soong, host of Against the Grain, about her life as an activist, educator, Marxist philosopher, and her engagement with radical movements, including the New Left, the IRA, and the Communist Party of Ireland.

ROAR magazine reviews “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

February 20, 2024

But there exists a different narrative, or at least there did in the 1930s, before it was buried under an avalanche of patriotic American propaganda and liberal historiography. According to this alternative understanding, the US was falling victim to fascism already in the 1920s — though a different sort of fascism than in Europe…

Robbery of the soil and the worker: International Socialism on Saito’s “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

“Kohei Saito’s book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism is based on extensive and ­painstaking research. As well as Marx’s published works, Saito makes use of notebooks that Marx kept on science and agriculture and that have only recently been made available. He argues that ecological questions were central to Marx’s worldview and defends a version of ecosocialism based on the notion of metabolism, and using the Marxist tools of value theory, contradiction and alienation….