Monthly Review Press

Howard Ryan’s Educational Justice reviewed by Teachers College Record

February 20, 2024

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...

New! Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation

February 20, 2024

Sickened by the contamination of their water, their air, of the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing... READ MORE

Helena Sheehan Arrives in the U.S. to discuss The Syriza Wave + New Greek Austerity Measures

February 20, 2024

As the Greek Parliament approves fresh austerity measures and protests rock Athens and Thessaloniki, author Helena Sheehan arrives on the East Coast, just in time to discuss this explosive situation and her new book, The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. Over the next two weeks, Sheehan will appear in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, then back to NYC for the Left Forum. Here is a short summary of her tour...

Gerald Horne on Trump in Saudi Arabia

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and author of several books, including Confronting Black Jacobins, Race to Revolution, and the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, talks to RT Moscow about Trump’s hypocrisy vis-à-vis Islam, money, and military arms, and how the president is reaching new lows in mixing business with politics…

New! The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers

February 20, 2024

U.S. immigration has been the subject of furious debates for decades. On one side, politicians and the media talk about aliens and criminals, with calls to “deport them all.” On the other side, some advocates idealize immigrants and gloss over problems associated with immigration. Dialogue becomes possible when we dig deeper and ask tough questions: Why are people in other countries leaving their homes and coming here? What does it mean to be “illegal”? How do immigration raids, prisons, and border walls impact communities? Who suffers and who profits from our current system—and what would happen if we transformed it?

Aeon: “Who Names Diseases?” – in which Rob Wallace figures prominently

February 20, 2024

In his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, the evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace draws a direct link between the growing threat of zoonotic diseases, and the agricultural practices that neoliberalism has encouraged—notably, the expansion and consolidation of agribusinesses, and the vertical integration of different stages of food production. The food we eat is produced by an ever-shrinking number of ever-growing mass-production units, in which vast herds or flocks of hybrid animals are packed into megabarns, forced to mature in a matter of months, and then slaughtered, processed and transported around the world.

Oakland, May 30: Against the Corporate Juggernaut – Howard Ryan on Educational Justice

February 20, 2024

Tuesday, May 30
5:00-7:00pm
2027 42nd Ave.
Oakland, CA 94601
With Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the helm, teachers, parents, and students have every reason to organize! But what exactly are we up against? Let’s talk about that with Howard Ryan, author of Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut, who will offer an analysis and organizing stories that can help our work.

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.

“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...

“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….”