[MR Press blog posts should be listed on this page.]
February 20, 2024
In or around Baltimore Tuesday, August 22? Come to Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse and hear Howard Ryan talk about his book, Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut
February 20, 2024
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions in which that critique was formed.
February 20, 2024
Gerald Horne, historian and author of 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 Nellie Bailey on the Black Agenda Report
February 20, 2024
David L. Wilson, author, with Jane Guskin, of the second edition of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers talks to Kansas City’s Heartland Radio Forum about Workers Across Borders, and Workers Who Cross Borders
February 20, 2024
Historian Gerald Horne, author of over thirty books, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Chris Steele on students’ need for the histories of resistance
February 20, 2024
Samir Amin’s Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism is a collection of essays written between 1990 and 2015 on Soviet and Russian history…. ¶ At first glance, the title might appear to be backwards, as the socialist Soviet Union no longer exists and the capitalist Russian Federation has been deemed to be its successor on the world stage. However, it is from this juncture that Amin asks the reader to look towards the future as a way to analyse the present in comparison with the past, rather than looking back at the past to better understand the present and the possible future. In short, the author’s aim is to juxtapose the future of communism (as a higher mode of production) against the present in comparison with Russia’s past
February 20, 2024
A book for a future society of buen vivir, or living well, with nature and other people? Yes, write Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams in Creating an Ecological Society. How to achieve sustainability with humanity and the planet? Start with context and vision to transcend the status quo of bio-sphere destruction. Reform is a part of the revolutionary process, according to the authors. It is not an either-or binary. The vision thing matters when it comes to the false consciousness of blaming other people for the system’s baked-in flaws. Dividing the working class to weaken it is elites’ go-to tactic. We see that now....
February 20, 2024
In August 2016, the International Geological Congress voted formally to recognise that the world has entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene. The effect of human activity on the planet has now become as significant as that of the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and ended the Cretaceous era. In recognising this, it is important not to fall into a view of human effects on the Earth that idealises a separation between human society and a reified ‘Nature’….
February 20, 2024
That first chapter goes on to consider two other products, iPhones and coffee. These too are produced in the global south for consumption in the north. Although very different products, Smith’s teasing out of the socioeconomic relations they embed shows their commonality. All are created under conditions of a super-exploitation which mainstream economics is at pains to conceal or obscure by a ‘value chain’ orthodoxy that would have us believe an iPhone made in China for $80 retails in the west for $800 not through exploitation but because the activities of shipping, advertising and packaging add $720 of value….
February 20, 2024
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.
