Monthly Review Press

Corporate farming and the new flu: Green Left Weekly reviews Rob Wallace’s book

February 20, 2024

A new influenza pandemic is quite possible, according to a study by researchers at the University of NSW’s School of Public Health. The study notes that 19 different influenza strains have affected humans in the last 100 years, but the speed with which new strains have emerged has increased over the past 15 years. There have been seven new strains in the past five years alone. ¶ In Big Farms Make Big Flu, published last year by Monthly Review Press, Rob Wallace agreed a pandemic is not just more than likely, it is probable, and echoes the necessity to prepare. But his focus is to identify why the rate of new virus strains has increased, which he sees as basic to how to effectively plan containment.

On the road to socialism, Truthout reviews Rethinking Revolution

February 20, 2024

Anti-capitalism needs a viable political party. Whether it’s a big one, like the Democratic Party—which Bernie Sanders’ supporters are hoping to influence and dreaming, perhaps, of taking over—or a robust third party that’s openly socialist, it’s clear that without a party that operates in conjunction with left movements, it will be difficult to achieve goals like Medicare for All, free higher education, student loan forgiveness, environmental and climate protection, and substantially shrinking the military and the vast prison system…. ¶ That is precisely what several essays in Rethinking Revolution advocate.

Analyzing the failures of Syriza: Systemic Disorder reviews Helena Sheehan’s book

February 20, 2024

So many put their puts hopes into Syriza; so many were bitterly disappointed. Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left proved wholly unable to resist the enormous pressures put on it and it is Greek working people who are paying the price, not excepting those who voted for Syriza. ¶ How should we analyze the depressing spectacle of what had been a genuinely Left party, indeed a coalition of leftist forces from a variety of socialist perspectives, self-destructing so rapidly? The simplistic response would be to wash our hands and condemn Syriza as “opportunists,” but we’ll learn exactly nothing with such an attitude...

Trump as Neo-Fascist? John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law & Disorder radio

February 20, 2024

Is Trump a neofascist? Analysts on the left, such as Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism, calling him a “rightwing populist.” Does it really matter what Trump is called? The poet, playwright, and political thinker, Bertolt Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?” Hear Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith speak with John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, who wrote the review of the month, “This Is Not Populism” in the June 2017 issue.

ResoluteReader reviews Ian Angus’s A Redder Shade of Green

February 20, 2024

This new collection of essays from one of the world’s leading Marxist environmentalists is an important contribution to discussions about how we can fight for a sustainable world, one where, as Ian Angus says quoting Marx, we live as “a society of good ancestors”. More than this however the book is an important reassertion of how to approach questions of science and politics that strengthen our ability to understand the world and change it.

Henry A. Giroux | “Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times”

February 20, 2024

What happens to democracy when the president of the United States labels critical media outlets as ‘enemies of the people’ and disparages the search for truth with the blanket term ‘fake news’? What happens to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical thinking becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled by an economics of contempt that blames the poor for their condition and subjects them to a culture of shaming? … ¶ What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality….

Jim Young’s Union Power reviewed by Labor Notes

February 20, 2024

For unions in corporate America, it’s always been hard times. Even in labor’s heyday—the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—unions had to struggle for everything. Plus, back then organizers risked being tarred as stooges for Moscow. ¶ Historian James Young makes those points clear in his readable new book Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania. But the book offers more than history—it’s instructive, showing how a progressive union can survive in the incredibly hostile and toxic environment of corporate America.

At least 484 Syrian and Iraqi civilians killed in air strikes, admits Cent Com: Gerald Horne weighs in

February 20, 2024

On June 3, The Independent and other media reported that the U.S.-led coalition (or Central Command) admitted killing at least 484 civilians in air strikes against Isis in Syria and Iraq. 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, appeared on RT International to discuss this report and its “scandalous understatement” of the loss of innocent lives.

“E.P. Thompson’s Socialist Humanism” in Against the Current

February 20, 2024

“The English working class ‘did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’ In frequently quoted lines from the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1780-1832), E.P. Thompson endeavored to ‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ ¶ More broadly, Thompson sought to elucidate class as a historical phenomenon that involved changing human relationships over time, rather than being a static structure or simple category of analysis….”

“Ragpicking Through History,” we discover, via Salvage, Jimmy Boggs

February 20, 2024

Salvage, a startling new quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters, brings us “Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists,” an article by Tithi Bhattacharya, in which James Boggs’s The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook receives notice...