Monthly Review Press

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....

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...

“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….”

“A World Turned Upside Down?” Leo Panitch on WORT’s “A Public Affair”

February 20, 2024

Leo Panitch, editor, with Greg Albo, of the annual Socialist Register, joins Allen Ruff, host of “A Public Affair” on radio station WORT (89.9FM, Madison, WI) to talk about global capitalism and the state of our world today, as reflected in the latest SR 2019: The World Turned Upside Down?

Michael Joseph Roberto, author of “The Coming of the American Behemoth,” on The Majority Report

February 20, 2024

Michael Joseph Roberto’s recently published The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940, is generating lots of provocative conversations. Recently Roberto talked with Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report about how finance capitalism is the essence of U.S. fascism.

February 9, NYC: Join Stephanie Urdang at the Riverside Book Club

February 20, 2024

In the New York City area this weekend? You’re invited to hear Stephanie J. Urdang discuss her memoir, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

UK’s Communist Review Faces Ian Angus’s Anthropocene

February 20, 2024

In October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that carbon emissions must be cut to zero by 2050, in order to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.1 The current British (non-binding) target for 2050 is an 80% cut. ...

American-Brand Fascism: Michael Joseph Roberto on NC Public Radio

February 20, 2024

Michael Joseph Roberto, author of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940, talks to Frank Stasio, host of The State of Things, about American-made fascism and what may happen, now that “American empire is on its last legs…