Monthly Review Press

New! Big Farms Make Big Flu — Catch it now!

New! Big Farms Make Big Flu — Catch it now!

In this collection of dispatches, by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Rob Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. With a precise and radical wit, Wallace juxtaposes ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens with microbial time travel and neoliberal Ebola. While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace’s collection is the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science into a new understanding of infections.

Building alternatives to neoliberalism in Latin America: Links interviews Michael Lebowitz

Building alternatives to neoliberalism in Latin America: Links interviews Michael Lebowitz

Michael A. Lebowitz is the author of Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted, and The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now. He was recently in Australia for the Socialism in the 21st Century conference, which was co-hosted by Links. In this interview, Lebowitz covers some of the topics he discussed during his visit regarding the opposition to neoliberalism and the prospects for a socialist alternative in Latin America today.

A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution reviewed in E-International Relations

A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution reviewed in E-International Relations

Drawing on exceptionally rare, difficult-to-access collections of underground publications, pamphlets, and oral testimonies—more difficult to access that the author admits—Cushion pushes back against several traditions of argumentation that have tended to cast labor struggle in the 1950s to the historiographical margins. Importantly, these lacunae in explaining the Cuban Revolution’s origins have remained equally persistent among Cuban and non-Cuban historians, the Revolution’s admirers and its fiercest critics.

Marciano: Steven Spielberg to direct another fantasy; this one about Walter Cronkite & the Vietnam War

Marciano: Steven Spielberg to direct another fantasy; this one about Walter Cronkite & the Vietnam War

The word out of Hollywood is that Steven Spielberg plans to direct a film about famed television commentator Walter Cronkite. According to Variety, it will highlight Cronkite’s protest against the War in Vietnam—especially ‘the role that he played in turning public opinion against the increasingly un-winnable conflict.’ So goes the myth. In reality, Cronkite never opposed the war itself; rather, he only came to question it after the Tet Offensive made it clear that the U.S. policy in Vietnam was not working.

Save the Georg Lukács Archive!

From the time the current rightist government in Hungary came into power, the archive of Georg Lukács–a preeminent Marxist of the 20th century–has been under a brutal attack. It has been gradually deprived of its subvention from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of its ability to pay its staff. Now, the government threatens to sell the property on which it is located and disperse the archive.

New! Samir Amin’s Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

New! Samir Amin’s Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world’s first significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society. According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that once produced the Soviet Union also produced a movement away from capitalism—a long transition that continues today. In seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia—and, by extension, the future of socialism itself.