Monthly Review Press

“Understanding the political economy of what we eat”: Communist Review on A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism

February 20, 2024

Too often, food and agriculture have been left out of left-wing political discourse, as if peripheral to the class struggle. But actually, they are crucial. Family and peasant farmers need to be able to feed themselves and their families, while workers need nutritious diets too. However, capitalism needs a supply of landless labourers who have nothing to sell but their labour power ...

India’s independent weekly, Frontier, reviews Michael Yates’s Can the Working Class Change the World?

February 20, 2024

This is the first of eight parts of Farooque Chowdhury’s review of this book for Frontier: An independent weekly since 1968. Look for the rest of the review, in compiled form, coming soon to MR Online...

New! The Biofuels Deception: Going Hungry on the Green Carbon Diet

February 20, 2024

Combining meticulous scientific narrative with devastating economic analysis, The Biofuels Deception argues that the seemingly innovative, hopeful campaign for “green energy” is actually driven by bio-technology industries and global grain-trading corporations. These corporate players are motivated by a late-capitalist need to cope with a crisis of accumulation; they have no real interest in mitigating climate change, alleviating poverty, or even creating “clean” energy….

“So many reasons to fight”: ISR on Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism

February 20, 2024

"Ecosocialism needs Marx," Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows why…. This work and Saito’s familiarity with a range of international debates regarding Marxist theory and practice make possible his beautiful analysis of Marx’s ecosocialism, an analysis that should inform our struggle for revolutionary socioecological change….

Yellow Journalism and the New Cold War: Jeremy Kuzmarov via Counterpunch

February 20, 2024

Like Saddam Hussein a decade and a half ago, Russia and its President Vladimir Putin have been repeatedly vilified in the Western media over the last five years, helping to mobilize popular support for the reemergence of a new Cold War...

New! From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty

February 20, 2024

In the early 1980s, China dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Mainstream history argues that this "decollectivization campaign" greatly improved agricultural productivity and the lives of the peasants. A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story....

Marx & Philosophy on Michael Lebowitz’s The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now

February 20, 2024

During the past two decades, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written a number of books, proposing to build socialism as a practical alternative. Lebowitz’s new book, The Socialist Imperative from Gotha to Now, is a continued project about proposing the building of socialism in the 21st century…. Lebowitz’s book attempts to establish a theoretical vision of socialism and the lessons from the experience of ‘real socialism’...

Science & Society reviews Ian Angus’s A Redder Shade of Green

February 20, 2024

A Redder Shade of Green is a very welcome compilation of posts from Ian Angus’ website “Climate and Capitalism,” some original, others updated and revised. Ian Angus is a Canadian ecosocialist activist and scholar. This book follows two other earlier ones, the excellent critique of populationism/neoMalthusianism (with Simon Butler), Too Many People (Haymarket, 2011), and Facing the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2016), a splendid introduction to this subject....

Jeremy Kuzmarov talks to Paul DeRienzo on TrumpWatch

February 20, 2024

Jeremy Kuzmarov, author, with John Marciano, of The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, talks with Paul DeRienzo about the little-remembered history of Russia-United States relations.

The Russians Are Coming, Again … Jeremy Kuzmarov on Black Agenda Radio

February 20, 2024

Jeremy Kuzmarov talks with Black Agenda Radio host Glen Ford about how Democrats and war-hawks are reaching for ever-higher heights of anti-Russian hysteria, ascribing near super-powers to Moscow and Vladimir Putin. All this is déjà vu for many older Americans, who remember the Cold War days when Russians were thought to be under every bed...