C.G. Beck’s “The Labor of Architecture”
December 23, 2025
Many congratulations to author C.G. Beck for getting the word out to new audiences about the efforts of architects to be recognized as workers...Tag: Reviews
Fascinating blow by blow on the Cuban workers’ parliaments (Pedro Ross reviewed for ‘New West Indian Guide’)
February 20, 2024
Mass meetings took place in 80,000 workplaces, neighborhood committees, farmers’ organisations, and the Federation of Cuban Women. These acted as a two-way conduit, informing the workers and farmers of the reality of the situation while, at the same time, allowing for votes on different options, all unpalatable, but some more acceptable than others. By giving ordinary people a direct say and a stake in the solution of the crisis, the Workers’ Parliaments brought back a commitment to the social gains of the Revolution and enabled Cuban society to slowly emerge from the “Special Period.”
Novel as biography (Radek reviewed in ‘Against the Current’)
February 20, 2024
In his 1995 novel Radek, published in English translation for the first time last year by Monthly Review Press, Stefan Heym portrays Karl Radek as not only a man of the world but a perpetual outsider — a socially awkward contrarian with stereotypically Jewish features, thick glasses and a big mouth. In this, Heym likely saw in Karl Radek something of a kindred spirit.
If the U.S. can’t boss the world, it will spitefully destroy it (Washington’s New Cold War in ‘CovertAction’ magazine)
February 20, 2024
U.S. leaders appear increasingly willing to unleash the military because they cannot accept a new multipolar world order in which the U.S. is not the pre-eminent economic power.
A slim book with profound impact (The Dialectics of Dependency reviewed in ‘Marx & Philosophy Review of Books’)
February 20, 2024
Dependency theory emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to explain the development of Latin America in its dependent relationship with advanced capitalist economies, the US in particular. It served a practical purpose of orienting Latin American Marxists in the revolutionary struggles of that period, following the inspiration of the Cuban revolution and the crises across the region in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, amongst others.
The undaunted I.F. Stone (The Hidden History of The Korean War reviewed in ‘The Progressive’)
February 20, 2024
To this day, memories of cities flattened by U.S. bombers—a scale of technological devastation almost unthinkable even after the atomic bombs of 1945—resonate among Koreans on both sides of the border.
Listen: Foster on the future of so-called “civilization” (The “Old Mole Variety Hour”)
February 20, 2024
Bill Resnick, host of KBOO’s “Old Mole Variety Hour,” recently talked to John Bellamy Foster about the future of the planet and what we call “civilization.” Foster is convinced that... READ MORE
Send MR books to a library in Texas (‘Counterpunch’ lists Monthly Review’s editors on “Best of 2022” list)
February 20, 2024
Here are the books published last year that taught me the most about the world we’re now living in, how it came to be this way and how we might, against all odds, go about changing it. So buy copies to help feed some starving writers, read them and then send them to a library in Texas....
“Stimulating…much to grapple with” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene reviewed in ‘The Resolute Reader’)
February 20, 2024
Foster explains that "in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic".
An inspiration and a warning (Ross’ How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution reviewed in ‘Morning Star’)
February 20, 2024
Cuba’s continuing economic crisis has produced a social malaise that manifests itself in many ways. One of them has been a political detachment including a decrease in political and electoral participation. Ross’s account of Cuba’s survival is at the same time an inspiration to everyone struggling for socialism, and a warning of the challenges to be faced in building it...