A long-standing critique of the writings of Marx and Engels has been their supposed lack of concern for the environmental damage caused by capitalism. Worse, even as they envisaged and fought for a world of human freedom, their conception of socialism showed a comprehensive disregard for how humans interact with nature. ¶ Marx has been viewed as Promethean: as soon as the proletariat had taken over the factories, its job would be simply to build more factories, in ever-expanding spheres of production. Given that the regimes claiming the mantle of Marx in the twentieth century took exactly that pathway, it’s not hard to understand why this charge gained such credence. ¶ However, that position has become wholly untenable thanks to two decades of scholarship by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett…. | more…
“ONE of the best books published on the recent fortunes of the Greek left, Helena Sheehan’s blend of the personal and political draws on her visits to Greece before and after Syriza’s dramatic rise to power. ¶ Her discussions with a wide variety of people from the left and on the street feature prominently as do her attendance at demonstrations, meetings and conferences in what is a lively, detailed and memorable account….” | more…
We live in a time of increasing peril and dizzying contradiction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of Donald Trump – a billionaire born with a gold-plated silver spoon in his mouth who was able to present himself as a man of the people, appealing, it seems, to a base of white workers who felt excluded from the “new economy” and abandoned amidst what he described in his inaugural address as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” | more…
How can we save the planet and stop catastrophic climate change? Recently, Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System and the recently released A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism, talked to Socialist Worker‘s Dave Sewell about just that. | more…
James Young serves up the pulse of workplace democracy in Union Power. His focus is on UE locals 506 and 618 that represent electrical manufacturing workers for General Electric, a global corporation. ¶ His narrative begins in 1937. Winds of global war rise, the Great Depression endures and the UE is born in a domestic landscape of labor dissent. ¶ In seven chapters of Young’s book, we discover the hows and whys of UE’s participatory democracy…. | more…
It is 2017 and the critique of corporate school reform has been around for some time. Beginning with Pauline Lipman’s critique of the Chicago Commercial Club’s role in remaking Chicago’s public schools (2004, 2011), Mike Fabricant and Michelle Fine’s critique of charter schools (2012), Ken Saltman’s critique of privatization (2007), and Sarah LeBlanc Goff’s exposé of the move of New Orleans from a public to a privatized school system (2009), they exposed the shortcomings of corporate or neoliberal reform efforts… | more…
On July 7, 2017, a group of the world’s biggest economic powers, known as the G20, met in Hamburg, Germany. What happened at the event? What kinds of realignments happened among governments? How did the U.S. emerge the meetings? Margaret Prescod of SojournerTruthradio/KPFK discussed this on July 11 with Gerald Horne, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of more than thirty books, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism | more…
John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review magazine and author of the forthcoming Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, talks to Don Shafer of Roundhouse Radio 98.3 Vancouver on climate change, the fate of the earth, and how we can’t give up… | more…
Gerald Horne, historian and author of several books, including the upcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Jaisal Noor of The Real News Network about July 8 KKK rally in Charlottesville, VA—and the origins of one of America’s oldest hate groups. | more…
The following is the preface to the 2017 French-language edition of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, originally published by Monthly Review Press in 2011. The French edition will be released by Éditions Critiques in September, and will appear as Ce que tout écologiste doit savoir à propos du capitalisme. | more…
Come to Chicago this weekend for Socialism2017, where thousands of organizers and intellectuals will participate in over 100 meetings—one of which will be with Monthly Review Press author Fred Magdoff and Socialist Worker writer Michael Ware.
Saturday, July 8, 2-3:30pm: Magdoff, author, with Chris Williams, of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, will discuss with Ware how, in fighting for environmental and social justice, reforms are vital but revolution is essential. | more…
Jaisal Noor of The Real News Network turns to Monthly Review Press author, Gerald Horne (Confronting Black Jacobins; The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism), for Horne’s historical perspective on Trump’s tweets and the National Rifle Association’s recent recruitment video | more…
Come to Central London, UK, to join organizers, intellectuals, and activists in a 4-day political festival of ideas, discussions, debates, art, films, and music! Speakers will include Ian Angus, author of “Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System”… | more…
