By John Smith Winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award
John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities—the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone—and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. Meticulously researched and
Many environmentalists disdain the ideas of Karl Marx. Some tout the spiritual virtues of environmental ‛ideals.’ Some argue for individual solutions like recycling, reduced consumption and “going back to the land.” Anti-communists claim that the ecological crimes of the Stalinist-era USSR flowed from Marxism itself. John Bellamy Foster’sMarx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature counters all these ideas. It is a dense and intricate analysis of Marxist theory, its historical and scientific foundations, and how central ecological concerns are to it. | more…
“… So what shaped Lenin to become the man he did? Krausz firmly places the Russian revolutionary into historical context, from his birth in 1870 up until his premature death in January 1924…. Under harsh circumstances, long spells in prison, illegality and exile, Lenin’s personality, Krausz says, was ‘an interesting alloy of tough and gentle traits … with undoubtedly a predominance of the former’. Lenin the man emerges from this account as mentally and physically courageous, as well as emotionally sensitive. He was not only an obdurate and loyal political comrade,
Gerald Horne’s latest book is an ambitious transnational history of the United States and Cuba from the 1700s to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It focuses on the shared and interconnected histories of slavery, the slave trade, Jim Crow, and the struggles against these oppressive systems in the two regions. | more…
The reason for socialists to have an interest in the situation in Latin America today is simple; the most significant political advances in the world today are taking place in Latin America. The Chilean revolutionary Marta Harnecker’s book A World to Build is perhaps the most important English language attempt so far to analyse and to move forward the discussion on the left internationally around these changes. | more…
Ecologist, biomathematician, philosopher of science, and Monthly Review author Richard Levins died January 19 at the age of 85. John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Levins wrote several articles over the years for Monthly Review magazine, and co-authored, with Richard C. Lewontin, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health
One of his most popular Monthly Review articles was “How to Visit a Socialist Country,” MR vol. 61, no. 11
“The Hidden Structure of Violence offers a psychologically sophisticated analysis of violence, ideal for curious lay readers and students…. It might be fair to say that Pilisuk and Rountree’s analysis of violence
In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Here, he develops and deepens the analysis by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, noted political theorist and socialist historian, author of a number of books and a professor at York University for three decades, has died of cancer at her Ottawa home at the age of 73.
With Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, she was coeditor of Monthly Review magazine from 1997 to 2000. With current MR editor John Bellamy Foster, Ellen edited two books for Monthly Review Press.
“This is Hell is a weekly longform political interview program broadcast across Chicago on WNUR since 1996. Every Saturday morning, Chuck Mertz works off his news hangover by talking to the journalists, authors, and activists working to make this world a slightly less hellish place….”
James Boggs, born in Marion Junction, Alabama, never dreamed of becoming President or a locomotive engineer. He grew up in a world where the white folks are gentlemen by day and Ku Klux Klanners by night. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Bessemer in 1937, Boggs took the first freight train north, bumming his way through the western part of the country, working in the hop fields of the state of Washington, cutting ice in Minnesota, and finally ending up
