Monthly Review Press

“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….”

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.

Rethink, Re-examine, but Don’t Abandon Revolution

February 20, 2024

August Nimtz’s essay in this book on Marx and Engels, and organization, alone would make it worthwhile. Nimtz shows that though they didn’t write a huge amount about political organization, Marx and Engels showed through their practice and fragmentary comments that they believed, like Lenin after them, that socialists need to get organized in advance of great social struggles if they wanted to transform society.

“Guernica remains, alas, timeless”: Cal Winslow, via Jacobin

February 20, 2024

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in just five weeks in the spring of 1937. ¶ Then living in Paris, Picasso, fifty-five, was already well-known. Born in Spain in 1881, he went to Paris in 1900; he had visited Spain in 1934 but would never return. ¶ Still, the insurgent Popular Front government appointed him director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, in absentia, and Picasso undertook several projects sympathetic to the Republic and to raise funds on its behalf. The government in turn asked him to produce a mural for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, and he agreed, though progress at first was slow. It was the April 26 attack at Guernica that moved him. He threw himself into the painting and in less than five weeks, astonishingly, had completed Guernica...

Henry Giroux, “Between Orwell and Huxley in the Age of New Authoritarianism”

February 20, 2024

Henry A. Giroux, professor at the Department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University and author of several books, including America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, spoke recently at the McMaster Alumni Association Progam

Helena Sheehan, Irish activist, author, coming to the U.S. for East Coast Book Tour!

February 20, 2024

Helena Sheehan, Marxist scholar, activist, and author, will soon be leaving Dublin, Ireland for a U.S. book tour of her recently published The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. Her first appearance will be Thursday, May 25, 6:30pm, NYC, New York University, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University, 53 Washington Square South, Manhattan

Gerald Horne and The Real News Network’s Paul Jay: “Comey Affair Sign of Fractured U.S.”

February 20, 2024

Historian Gerald Horne, author of several books, including Confronting Black Jacobins and Race to Revolution talks with TRNN anchor Paul Jay about Trump’s firing FBI Director James Comey

Brian Tokar in NYC’s The Indypendent: “Fighting Climate Change in the Age of Trump”

February 20, 2024

Long-time activist and author Brian Tokar, who, with Fred Magdoff, wrote Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal, just wrote a piece for the May issue of The... READ MORE

Anti-Imperialist U reviews Gerald Horne’s Confronting Black Jacobins

February 20, 2024

The Haitian Revolution, which ran from 1791-1804 was one of the most important events in modern history. It was the first successful anti-slavery revolution…. I dealt with this glorious moment in human history in my “Revolution in Haiti” based on C.L.R James classic The Black Jacobins…. Now I will deal with the part the Haitian revolution played in not only ending slavery on the island but throughout the americas relying on yet another masterpiece from Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins, which is both a sequel to The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and a companion to his excellent Negro Comrades of the Crown…

BLACK PERSPECTIVES: Online Roundtable: Gerald Horne’s Black Radical History, June 5-10

February 20, 2024

Black Perspectives is hosting an online roundtable on Gerald Horne’s wide-ranging scholarly contributions to African American history and the black radical tradition. “Gerald Horne’s Black Radical History” will assemble a... READ MORE