Montly Review

• Recently reissued! The Rainbow Challenge (Excerpt)

  From the Preface to the new edition of The Rainbow Challenge: Jesse Jackson’s first presidential primary race in 1984 should have been a wakeup call for the Democratic Party. Without... READ MORE

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• In the Public Eye: “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?'”

  The latest: The London Review of Books' Letters section features a quote from John Bellamy Foster's introduction....

  The post In the Public Eye: “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?'” appeared first on Monthly Review.

• New! Chris dePloeg’s “The Exterminating Empire”

  REVIEWS: Counterpunch, “Capitalism is Waging War on Palestine While Creating a Burning Planet” by Daniel Falcone: Daniel Falcone: What is the central argument of The Exterminating Empire and how is... READ MORE

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• Recent release: Ian Angus’ “Metabolic Rifts”

  Featured review: "Severed Universal Metabolism and Predatory Logic: Groundwork for an Ecosocialist Critique of Capitalism" by Varun Wigmal (INSEE Journal);

  "The bulk of the book is an attempt to explain the core concepts of ecological Marxism and political ecology by detailing the metabolic processes vital to Earth’s systems. In Chapter 10, Angus discusses the carbon cycle’s breakdown—which is driving climate change—and in Chapter 11, he describes how industrial agriculture is pumping nitrogen into Earth’s systems faster than any natural process through fertilizers, disrupting the nitrogen cycle. Angus proposes a radical reduction in the use of nitrogen and chemical fertilizers as a solution to environmental damage, and envisions a time when it will be possible to feed people without them. These chapters are the strength of Angus’ book. They demonstrate how Marxists should use science to understand the complexity of the damage inflicted by capitalism on the Earth’s systems and develop viable solutions based on the idea of hope without optimism, i.e., confronting adversity rather than denying it

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• Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?”

  The latest: Rockhill does not claim, as he was immediately accused of doing, that “Western Marxism” was an “invention” of the CIA. But he reconstructs how the integration of this theoretical output into the “intellectual world war” against socialism was organized and conceptually thought through. He shows how far this integration went in specific cases and why it was logically consistent in terms of content. It was precisely because the “Western Marxists” tended “to support imperialism, or at least to make it acceptable.” It is to Rockhill’s credit that, drawing on the framework of a Marxist history of ideas, a discipline that has largely died out in the German-speaking world, he undertook the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of this “world war.”

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