Monthly Review Press

“A world worth fighting for”: Agrarian South reviews Creating an Ecological Society

February 20, 2024

At a time when capitalism is widely considered as the only and inevitable system, there are seldom critiques that go beyond understanding the inherent faults of the capitalist system to establishing the possibility of an alternative. This book is the latest contribution by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams in their lifelong commitment not only to elucidate the ecological crises entailed in capitalism, but to provide the basis and the possibilities for an alternate system: eco-socialism....

Steve Early on Unions Confronting “Weinsteins in the Workplace”

February 20, 2024

Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress and Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, looks at the role of labor unions in dealing with sexual harassment and how “to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the ‘house of labor’”...

New! Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

February 20, 2024

Urdang’s memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home, as she grapples with the power of nostalgia, and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continues to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, she belongs. “My South Africa!” she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, “How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain?”

Helena Sheehan, via podcast, discusses her book, The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

February 20, 2024

Helena Sheehan, author of The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, discusses her book–and the origins and history of Syriza, the radical Greek coalition party–with Tom O’Brien, host of the podcast From Alpha to Omega

Calling out the corporate program to deform schools: Educational Justice reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Howard Ryan is an educationalist and journalist, who has written a handbook that offers ‘theory, strategy and organizing case studies to inform and inspire those who are working to rebuild public education and put an end to the corporate occupation of our schools’. The book can be read as a whole, or can be used as a reference guide to explore some key ideas, as the book is neatly divided up into sections...

Super-Size that Commodity: A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism reviewed by Resilience

February 20, 2024

Don’t expect a whole lot of taste when you sit down to a plateful of commodities. That might be a fitting but unintended lesson for foodies who work through the new book by Eric Holt-Giménez. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism will reward a careful reader with lots of insights—but it won’t do much for the taste buds. While A Foodie’s Guide is lacking in recipes or menu ideas, it shines in helping us to understand the struggles of the men and women who work in the farms and packing plants...

Is Capitalism a Barrier to Food Justice? Author Eric Holt-Giménez interviewed by Civil Eats

February 20, 2024

No consumer, farmer, or activist participates in the food system without also participating in capitalism. To Eric Holt-Giménez, the director of Food First, this is a basic truth that’s too often overlooked in the struggle to change our broken food system. In his new book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, Holt-Giménez delineates the basic truths of capitalism and how they are connected to the history of our food system. Part history book, part practical guide, the book links many of the injustices associated with food to other inequities, arguing that capitalism fuels and is fueled by oppression. If we better understand “the rudiments of how capitalism operates,” he explains, ‘we can better grasp why our food system is the way it is, and how we can change it

Foodies: “Why is it so critical to understand our food’s origins, while we fetishize the perfect morsel?”

February 20, 2024

Holt-Giménez: “We already produce one and one-half times more than enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet… People go hungry not because there’s not enough food; they go hungry because they can’t afford food…”

ResoluteReader reviews A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism

February 20, 2024

There is a growing movement of people thinking about how their food is grown, what it contains and its impact on their health and the environment. Often this is tied up with an individualistic view of improving the world – the idea that you can save the world by simply choosing the best food with the least impact on the planet. Eric Holt-Giménez explains he wrote "A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism" precisely to argue that this approach is inadequate...

Ecosocialism or planetary barbarism: International Socialist Review considers Facing the Anthropocene

February 20, 2024

According to Stephen Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, poor little America got hoodwinked by devious Asians, signing a deal that would wreck the economy and throw millions of people out of work, especially (white) coal miners in Appalachia, whom the president loves dearly. Climate change is an insignificant issue compared to these hardships and injustices. Coal is a fantastic fuel that will return America to greatness. ¶ Contrast this with the closing of Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System...