Top Menu

Celebrate Rosa Luxemburg’s birthday (her 146th) and, against all odds, bring on a swift transition to socialism!

To celebrate Red Rosa’s March 5 birthday, to mark the inarguable fact that, even in death, Rosa Luxemburg is the antithesis of Donald Trump, and to lament the injustice that, while she went to prison, nobody in the Trump administration is there yet…

Monthly Review Press is proud to offer a 50% discount on all our books
—both print and electronic—
Starting midnight, March 5 and ending midnight, March 10
Just enter the coupon code: 50OFFMAY510 to receive 50% off at checkout | more…

The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

THE SYRIZA WAVE reviewed by Dromos tis Aristeras (The Road Left)

Helena Sheehan did not become a friend of Greece only because of the crisis. She begins her new book The Syriza Wave writing, “Greece lived in my imagination long before I set foot in it….” Sheehan studied philosophy, became a philosopher, a professor at Dublin University, and wrote important books like Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History. For 25 years, she monitored the political situation in Greece. At the start of the crisis, she was one of the first in Europe to highlight the rise of the left in the south and to play a part in the creation of a dynamic pan-European solidarity movement. | more…

Mexico's Revolution Then and Now

James Cockroft on Trump Officials’ Mexico Visit

In light of Mexican President Nieto’s cancellation of his White House visit, James D. Cockroft, author of Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now, discusses with Brian Becker, host of Loud & Clear, what it means that two Trump cabinet members—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly—have gone to Mexico to meet with the president. Is there any chance for badly damaged Mexican/American relations to improve? Meanwhile, Mexican people are in the streets. They’re angry not just at Trump but at their own government. Might there a massive, cross-border protest and resistance? | more…

Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic

The American Historical Review on Gerald Horne’s Confronting Black Jacobins

The “Black Jacobins” referenced in this book’s title will be familiar to readers of eighteenth-century Atlantic and Caribbean history, in addition to those who study slavery, antislavery, and abolition, and of course to students of the Haitian Revolution. C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, first published in 1938 and then reissued in 1963, rang (indeed, rings) with an urgent and eloquent Pan-African politics, often openly tied to contemporary issues, | more…

Thinking Allowed: BBC Radio 4 talks to Ursula Huws on Platform Capitalism

Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age, joins host Laurie Taylor with Nick Srnicek, Lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London, and Andrew Leyshon, Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, to discuss how powerful tech companies are revolutionizing the global economy. | more…

The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

The Syriza Wave reviewed by New Politics

For activists in solidarity with the struggles in Greece over the last decade, the initial chapters of The Syriza Wave read like the diary of a fellow-traveler, in the best sense of the word. U.S.-born Sheehan is an intellectual, academic, and longtime activist of the Irish left. Incorporating these identities, her account of the dynamics of the now famous Democracy Rising conference in Athens provides an example of Sheehan’s incisiveness. The conference took place in July of 2015 and opened mere days after the announcement that an agreement had been reached for a third austerity memorandum between the Troika and the Syriza government. | more…

Marta Harnecker: How to read Capital today, lessons from Latin America

Marta Harnecker, author of A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, explains “How do read Capital today, lessons from Latin America.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung | more…

Michael Lebowitz on Marx’s Capital: “If you don’t understand the Second Product, you understand nothing”

Michael A. Lebowitz, author of several MRP books, among them, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, explains that “If you don’t understand the Second Product in Capital, you understand nothing.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. | more…

The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now

Melrose on Lebowitz: The Socialist Imperative

‘The socialist imperative,’ according to Michael A. Lebowitz, is to ‘end capitalism and build a society of associated producers oriented to the full development of human potential.’ To move beyond capitalism, to understand how capitalism is failing and why it ought to be superseded today, as a matter of urgency, is the primary purpose of Lebowitz’s The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, a collection of essays based mostly on previous papers, books, and contributions. ‘The necessity to end the capitalist system and to replace it with that inverse situation oriented to the worker’s own need for development is undeniable’ insists Lebowitz. ‘Very simply,’ he concludes his first chapter, ‘if we are to have any dreams, we must end capitalism now, by all means possible….’ | more…

Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania

New! Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania

The United Electrical Workers Union, built by hundreds of rank-and-file worker-activists in the quintessentially industrial town of Erie, Pennsylvania, was able to transform the conditions of the working class largely because it went beyond the standard call for living wages to demand quantum leaps in worker control over workplaces, community institutions, and the policies of the federal government itself. James Young’s book is a richly empowering history told from below, showing that the collective efforts of the many can challenge the supremacy of the few. | more…