Monthly Review Press

No workers’ paradise, but the GDR wasn’t a prison, either: novelist Eve Ottenberg reviews “A Socialist Defector”

February 20, 2024

From the perspective of 2019, it’s often difficult to recall the cold war hysteria over East Germany. It was called a secret police state. Everyone there was said to be oppressively monitored if not actively harassed by the Stasi. For Americans, it epitomized communist tyranny. Then along comes Victor Grossman’s memoir, A Socialist Defector–he fled US anticommunism to East Germany in 1952–and the distortions about East Germany (GDR) go right out the window…

“National Liberation in an International Context”–Counterpunch on “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

As autobiography, Navigating the Zeitgeist is a fascinating account of events and personalities with whom Sheehan was deeply involved….

Robin Morgan talks with Stephanie Urdang about what’s going on in South Africa

February 20, 2024

Robin Morgan, poet, author, and political theorist, hosts a weekly, hour-long, nationally syndicated radio show based at the Women’s Media Center. On May 12, she talked with Stephanie J. Urdang, South African journalist, activist, and author of Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa, about the recent election and 25th anniversary of South African liberation.

Ronnie Kasrils on South Africa and Palestine, comparing one apartheid to another…

February 20, 2024

Ronnie Kasrils, South African anti-apartheid activist, former South African Minister for Intelligence Services, and author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, appears on RT to talk with Afshin Rattansi, host of Going Underground, about current South African life, the ANC, and how, regarding the current Palestinian struggle, one apartheid compares to another…

In the Face of the Present Danger: Marx & Philosophy reviews “The Syriza Wave”

February 20, 2024

The book by the philosopher Helena Sheehan follows by and large the typical structure of Greek tragedy. Sheehan analyses the five key years (from 2012 to 2016) and faces of Syriza from the period of counter-hegemonic movement showing Syriza preparing to catch power and giving voice to a society of anger...

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 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. ...

“A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution”: reviewed by the New West Indian Guide

February 20, 2024

Stephen Cushion’s A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution, the result of extensive archival and oral history research, is one of the most important books (in any language) on the history of the Batista regime and its opponents during the 1950s to appear in the last three or more decades. It is also an openly revisionist account that challenges much research and writing produced by both Cuban and foreign scholars….

“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....