Monthly Review Press

“What the f… and get back to work!”–The Stansbury Forum considers Michael Yates’s new book

February 20, 2024

The book’s title poses a daunting question: Can the Working Class Change the World? Then, in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages, it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we pored over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction….

“One of the great organic intellectuals of our time”–Countercurrents reviews Samir Amin’s “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

Only People Make Their Own History is the first ever posthumous publication of Amin’s work. It includes ten of Amin’s most important essays published in the 21st century, and an introduction by renowned Marxist literary critic, Aijaz Ahmad….

Nothing Green about Bio-Energy: the Real Democracy Movement reviews “The Biofuels Deception”

February 20, 2024

The story of bio-fuels is a moral tale of how marketised, profit-driven responses to climate change will both fail to solve the problem and cause unconsidered damaging outcomes…. ¶ In The Biofuels Deception,Okbazghi Yohannes traces the industry’s beginnings back to the Bush administration and the idea that the world was reaching ‘peak oil’….

Zillah Eisenstein: New Feminisms in the Chaos

February 20, 2024

Recently, Zillah Eisenstein, author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution–forthcoming in May–delivered an address titled “Personal and Political Feminisms: Finding Understandings Amid the Chaos.”

Zillah Eisenstein and the need to understand white supremacy, capitalism, and misogyny simultaneously

February 20, 2024

Recently, Zillah Eisenstein, author of the forthcoming Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, was interviewed by phone on Berkeley, CA radio KPFA, 94.1FM by Lisa Dettmer, host of the Women's Magazine.

New! By Samir Amin: “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

Radical political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential. Monthly Review Press is honored to publish this volume, culled from the Monthly Review magazine, of ten of Samir Amin’s most significant essays written in the twenty-first century. ...

“Wall Street’s Think Tank”–New in Paperback, with Afterword

February 20, 2024

The Council on Foreign Relations is the world’s most powerful private foreign-policy think tank and membership organization. Dominated by Wall Street, it claims among its members a high percentage of past and present top U.S. government officials as well as corporate leaders and influential figures in the fields of education, media, law, and nonprofit work. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the Council on Foreign Relations from the 1970s to the present, and this new paperback edition includes an Afterword discussing the Trump Administration and the Council....

“Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic”: Jeremy Kuzmarov via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

“The release of the Mueller report and its conclusion that President Donald J. Trump and his top aides did not collude with Russia has prompted some important critical reflection on the American media and its penchant for sensationalism….”

Spoiler alert: Capitalists will not make things better–The Progressive Populist reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

February 20, 2024

“In six chapters, Yates delivers a primer on radical economics. It is no mean feat, but he is up to it. ¶ In Chapter One, ‘The Working Class,’ Yates defines it, qualitatively and quantitatively. He refines the numbers that mainstream economists use to fog the oppressive nature of the system. ¶ Yates sketches an ‘analytical scaffolding’ of global labor, from the exploited (wages) and expropriated (theft). Yates explains how wage and unwaged labor are integral to the system, similar to the era of slave and ‘free’ workers...

Science & Society reviews Samir Amin’s “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”

February 20, 2024

In this short book Samir Amin, a distinguished left intellectual with a career spanning many decades, offers an analysis of Russia and its role in the transition from capitalism to socialism. The book consists of six essays written between 1990 and 2015, supplemented by a new commentary at the end. Amin’s approach combines the Marxist theory of historical materialism with World Systems theory....