Monthly Review Press

Counterfire reviews “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism” along with “Climate Leviathan”

February 20, 2024

The two works considered here take on very different aspects of the general environmental crisis we face. In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright consider the political consequences of a continued failure to prevent catastrophic climate change, whereas Holt-Giménez’s Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism considers the food system’s role in and distortion by capitalism. This difference in approach makes it all the more notable that both start from the assumption that on their particular issue, the Left has failed…

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: 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.”

International Socialist Review thinks “India After Naxalbari” = required reading

February 20, 2024

D’Mello’s tour de force is both a history of modern India and its ‘rotten liberal democracy,’ including the left’s challenge to it, and a fine-grained look at India’s Maoist movement. It combines a sharp historical account with critical analysis, along with some original theoretical insights…

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....

“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….”

For a new post-capitalist world: ResoluteReader reviews “The Biofuels Deception”

February 20, 2024

On March 15 2019 up to 1.5 million students walked out of class to demand action in the face of looming environmental catastrophe. In the UK one of the most popular slogans was “System Change not Climate Change” reflecting the protesters’ feelings that capitalism and its politicians had failed them. As Marxist writers like John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus have shown, capitalism is at heart, a system that puts the accumulation of wealth above the general interests of people and plane