Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, is the author of several books MRP books, including The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. Recently, with Paul Birkett, he wrote Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill Publishers), to be released in the U.S. December 13. John Bellamy Foster was interviewed by Christian Stache from the Berlin-based daily, Junge Welt. | more…
Alan Wieder, author of Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation, talks to Rag Radio‘s Thorne Dreyer about Studs Terkel, the great leftist broadcaster, author, and raconteur. | more…
When it was made, Socialist Register’s decision to devote its 2016 issue to the far Right was prescient; when published late last year it was more than timely. Now, both it and this review are in danger of being overtaken by the phenom- enon they’re describing. If the far Right was on the march in 2015, its progress is even more alarmingly visible now. | more…
Marta Harnecker, author of over eighty books and monographs in several languages, including A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, wrote 12 articles on political activism and revolutionary vision, published in Venezuela in 2004. These articles were revised and updated this year, and now appear, translated by Federico Fuentes, on the Old and New Project website, with an introduction by the editors | more…
Leo Panitch, distinguish professor at York University, Canada, is the author of several books and the editor, with Greg Albo, of The Socialist Register, an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the international independent new left. | more…
We are living in a time of unparalleled ecological breakdowns and the crisis is much worse than most people realise. There are other books that tell this harrowing story, but Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene is different…. Angus makes clear that ‘a 4°C world would not just be warmer: almost all the world will be thrust into a new climate regime’. It would mean today’s record-breaking temperatures would become the new normal… Unlike many of the other recent books published about the Anthropocene, Angus’s book devotes a lot of space to exploring the social and economic causes of the crisis. | more…
Laurence H. Shoup, author of Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, talks to German financial journalist Lars Schall about the history of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on LarsSchall.com.
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E.P. Thompson (1924–1993) wore several hats during his life. His magnum opus as a historian was The Making of the English Working Class, one of the greatest history books written in the twentieth century in any language. He fought tirelessly for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, which almost surely took years off his life. He may well be least remembered for being a founder of the British New Left. For this reason, Cal Winslow’s selection of Thompson’s writings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s is especially welcome and timely—though not surprising, since Winslow was a student of Thompson’s at the University of Warwick and is a longtime activist and writer. | more…
Monthly Review Press author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, Henry A. Giroux writes frequently for Truthout.org
“This week, Donald Trump lowered the bar even further by attacking the Muslim parents of US Army Captain Humayan Khan, who was killed in 2004 by a suicide bomber while he was trying to save the lives of the men in his unit…. ¶ I have recently returned to reading Leo Lowenthal, particularly his insightful essay, “Terror’s Atomization of Man,” first published in the January 1, 1946 issue of Commentary and reprinted in his book, False Prophets: Studies
Studs Terkel was an American icon who had no use for America’s cult of celebrity. He was a leftist who valued human beings over political dogma. In scores of books and thousands of radio and television broadcasts, Studs paid attention—and respect—to “ordinary” human beings of all classes and colors, as they talked about their lives as workers, dreamers, survivors. Alan Wieder’s Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation is the first comprehensive book about this man. | more…
July 2, 2016, London: John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century. | more…
Cushion is able to make a substantial case that the working-class contribution to the revolution has been severely underestimated, and that in fact Castro’s guerrilla movement would not have been able to take power without working-class militancy. The story is detailed and intricate, but full of interest, beginning with the defeat of the 1933 general strike, which first brought Batista to political leadership in Cuba, but concentrating on the years of the latter’s dictatorship proper, from March 1952, to the consolidation of Castro’s government in 1959 | more…
Facing the Anthropocene hits nails on their heads over and over again. It should transform the relationship between leftist ecological thought and Earth System science. It’s easy to praise it here, because Angus’s analysis is in many ways very similar to my own in The Birth of the Anthropocene…. I think that the great thing about Facing the Anthropocene—and this might sound like faint praise, but it isn’t—is just how sensible it is. It’s learned and principled and exciting and all of that. But most of all it’s wonderfully well-considered. | more…