Monthly Review Press

New! “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society”

February 20, 2024

There are more than twenty-five comprehensive biographies of Marx, but none of them consider his life and work in equal, corresponding measure. This biography, planned for three volumes, aims to include what most biographies have reduced to mere background: the contemporary conflicts, struggles, and disputes that engaged Marx at the time of his writings, alongside his complex relationships with a varied assortment of friends and opponents....

African Swine Fever, Industrial Farming, and Us–Rob Wallace on The Real News

February 20, 2024

WILPERT: Joining me now to discuss the causes, consequences, and solutions to African Swine Fever is Rob Wallace….
WALLACE: Hello. I would say it was a pleasure to be here, but I think when Real News’s audience sees me, they know that some terrible disease has happened out there somewhere….”

“Original, engaging, cliche-free”: UK’s Morning Star navigates Helena Sheehan’s Zeitgeist

February 20, 2024

Born into a typical all-American and socially conservative family of Irish Catholic origin, it’s fair to say that Helena Sheehan’s eventual immersion in left politics would probably have come as much of a shock to her as it did to her immediate family...

“Moving beyond Neoliberal Models of Health Care”: Medical Anthropology reviews “Health Care Under the Knife”

February 20, 2024

Why are US health-care costs far higher than elsewhere in the world? And why, if so much more is spent, are such critical outcomes as rates of infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy and treatments for serious diseases not significantly better – and often markedly worse – than in other economically comparable countries?...

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….

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…

The only way forward is abolitionist, socialist, and feminist: Zillah Eisenstein talks to This Is Hell!

February 20, 2024

Zillah Eisenstein, author of recently published Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, talks about the crises all humans face–of capitalism, of racism, of misogyny–and how these crises cannot be reformed individually, but must be understood and fought with revolutionary rethinking, on This is Hell!, WNUR-FM.

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.

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. ...

Fighting Fully Conscious: Counterfire reviews Michael Tigar’s “Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power”

February 20, 2024

Reading between the lines is a skill we all need. Justice, freedom, equality and other fine ideals are invoked daily, but what do they really mean? In the abstract, it is impossible to say, for it is only when they are used in concrete contexts that we can get some meaningful handle on them….