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….

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…

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…

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. ...

“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….

“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...