Monthly Review Press

“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....

A World to Win! reviews “The Coming of the American Behemoth”

February 20, 2024

In the 21st century, we live in a world wholly dominated by the US empire and its allies, and capitalism maintains its stranglehold on the lives of working class people across the entire globe, all the while destroying the environment, posing an existential threat not only to humanity but all life on Earth….

Jeremy Kuzmarov: “Democrats play the Russia card … Trump wins”

February 20, 2024

The New York Times headline said it all: Mueller Finds No Trump Russia Conspiracy. ¶ After two years of investigation and $25 million in taxpayer dollars, the special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that President Donald J. Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election....

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

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. ...

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

Gerald Horne on Jamaican Radio recounts the apocalyptic loss and misery behind settler colonialism

February 20, 2024

Recently, Gerald Horne, renowned historian and prolific author, talked with Ka’Bu Maat Kheru, host of “The Africa Forum: Running African” about his book, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. They begin by discussing the importance of Jamaica in colonial history.