Monthly Review Press

Esther Farmer is the director and playwright of “Wrestling with Zionism” and produces storytelling workshops as a JVP-National artist nationwide. She has played lead roles in the New York City Housing Authority, as a United Nations representative, and as a founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (she/her) is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science at Hunter College, City University of New York. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award, she is also a JVP-NYC chapter leader, classical pianist, and kickboxer. Sarah Sills is a life-long artist-activist. She has co-led a Teamsters delegation to China, organized clerical workers at Columbia, raised money for Salvadoran women’s co-ops during the war, and worked at a pro-Aristide Haitian newspaper. She also produces storytelling workshops, and is involved in “Wrestling with Zionism.”

A LAND WITH A PEOPLE

Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism

Edited by ESTHER FARMER, ROSALIND PETCHESKY, and SARAH SILLS

An intimate postcard from queer Palestine, conveying stories of endurance and community, resistance, and transformation

A Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic Palestinian legal scholar and activist, Noura Erakat, this book began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area. Stories touch hearts, open minds, and transform our understanding of the “other”—as well as our comprehension of own roles and responsibilities— and A Land With a People emerges from this reckoning. It brings us the narratives of secular, Muslim, Christian, and queer Palestinians who endure the particular brand of settler colonialism known as Zionism. It relays the transformational journeys of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, queer, and Palestinian Jews who have come to reject the received Zionist narrative. Unflinching in their confrontation of the power dynamics that underlie their transformation process, these writers find the courage to face what has happened to historic Palestine, and to their own families as a result. Contextualized by a detailed historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future—one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be.

October 2021 184 pages • 6 x 9 30 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781583679296 • $19.00S Cloth • 9781583679302 • $89.00X

Memoir

THE LABOR GUIDE TO RETIREMENT PLANS

JAMES W. RUSSELL

A helpful how-to for workers navigating their retirement and pension options, from the labor organizer's perspective

Researching retirement plans should not take the rest of your life, even if deciphering the relevant paperwork seems to have become a full-time job. Deliberately elaborate legalese is obscuring the efforts of financial elites to seize control of workers' collective retirement savings—and The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans is here to translate. Neoliberal retirement reforms have escalated elites' efforts to replace guaranteed workplace retirement plans with weak 401(k)-like savings accounts and risky stock market investment schemes. The result is arguably the largest source of labor value expropriation over the last four decades. What do workers need to know as they assess their future prospects—especially in terms of the security their retirement plans may or may not bring? What should union activists keep in mind as they push for the national and workplace reforms needed to produce greater retirement security? This nuts-and-bolts book provides a much-needed demystification of the retirement system. Even more than that, The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans enables us to take charge of our own personal futures as a first step towards taking back what belongs to us all.

James W. Russell is Affiliate Scholar of Public Policy at Portland State University and University Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of nine books, including Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis and Double Standard: Social Policy in Europe and the United States. He led efforts to replace a 401(k)-like plan with a more secure, traditional pension plan as part of one of the first employee movements to successfully challenge the dominant trend.

November 2021 256 pages • 5.5 x 8.25 Paper • 9781583679333 • $24.00A Cloth • 9781583679340 • $89.00X

Political Science

December 2021 320 pages • 6 x 9 Paper • $29.00S 9781583679371 Political Science

NEW POLARIZATIONS AND OLD CONTRADICTIONS: THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM

Socialist Register 2022 Edited by GREG ALBO and COLIN LEYS

"Polarization" is a word commonly used by everyone from mainstream journalists to the person in the street, whatever their political stripe. But this widely recognized phenomenon deserves scrutiny. This volume takes up the challenge, asking such questions as: Are the current tendencies towards polarization new, and if so, what is their significance? What underlying contradictions—between race, class, income, gender, and geopolitics—do the latest polarization trends expose? And to what extent can "centrist" politics continue to hold and contain these internal contradictions? This volume's original essays examine the escalating polarization of national, racial, generational, and other identities, all in the context of growing economic inequality, new forms of regional and urban antagonism, "vaccine nationalism," and the shifting parameters of rivalry between the "Great Powers."

Greg Albo is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

February 2022 512 pages • 5.5 x 8.25 Paper • $34.00S 9781583679494 Cloth • $99.00 9781583679500

Philosophy | Political Theory

BEYOND LEVIATHAN

Critique of the State ISTVÁN MÉSZÁROS

Edited by JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

A field-defining masterwork, this posthumous publication maps the evolution of the idea of the state from ancient Greece to today

István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-edged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of “the withering away of the state.” In his definitive, seminal work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

István Mészáros was a professor emeritus at the University of Sussex and a world renown philosopher and critic. He authored Marx’s Theory of Alienation, Beyond Capital, and over a dozen other titles.

INEQUALITY, CLASS, AND ECONOMICS

ERIC SCHUTZ

What if neoclassical economics addressed the question of class? This accessible overview of economic theory launches this investigation

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society— and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. A mere nine months into the lockdown, the net worth of the infamous Forbes 400 increased by one trillion dollars; In a single year the US poverty rate rose by the largest amount ever since record-keeping began sixty years ago. At the same time, mass unemployment imperiled or erased the fragile right to quality health care for a substantial number of people living in states without Medicaid. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illumines the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times— and reveals them as the very same structures of power at the foundations of the class system under today's capitalism. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics offers prescriptions that can genuinely address the steepening and hardening of class boundaries. This book pushes past economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last.

Eric Schutz is a Professor Emeritus at Rollins College, where he taught a great variety of Economics courses from 1987-2015. He is the author of Markets and Power: The Twentieth Century Command Economy and Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class, as well as articles in the Review of Radical Political Economics, the Forum for Social Economics, the Journal of Economic Issues, and the Encyclopedia of Political Economy. He lives with his wife in western North Carolina.

January 2022 320 pages • 5.5 x 8.25 7 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781583679418 • $27.00S Cloth • 9781583679425 • $89.00X

Political Science

John Bellamy Foster is an editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His previous books on ecology include: The Vulnerable Planet, Marx’s Ecology, Hungry for Profit (edited with Fred Magdoff and Frederick Buttel), Ecology Against Capitalism, The Ecological Revolution, The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff), Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett), and The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark).

THE RETURN OF NATURE

Socialism and Ecology JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

Winner, 2020 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize A fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology

Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, en- compassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of the efforts to unite questions of social justice and environmental sustainability, and helps us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies. The Return of Nature begins with the deaths of Darwin (1882) and Marx (1883) and moves on until the rise of the ecological age in the 1960s and 1970s. Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels, to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen J. Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, he delivers a far-reaching and fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology. Ultimately, what this book asks for is nothing short of revolution: a long, ecological revolution, aimed at making peace with the planet while meeting collective human needs.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

June 2021 672 pages • 6 x 9.25 Paper • 9781583679289 • $28.00S Cloth • 9781583678367

History

A LEFT GREEN NEW DEAL

An Internationalist Blueprint BERND RIEXINGER, LIA BECKER, KATHARINA DAHME and CHRISTINA KAINDL

What does a successful socialist Green New Deal look like?

With the cascading effects of multiple ongoing health and economic crises, conditions are ripe for the emergence of a global progressive social project capable of moving us beyond business-as-usual and eradicating the fundamental causes of misery: namely, a global Green New Deal. But simply creating new "green jobs" within the current capitalist system is not nearly enough. If we are to take on climate change, it is imperative that we first of all engage in “system change,” a process rooted in socialism. Shifting beyond the American notion of the Green New Deal and adding vital internationalist dimension, A Left Green New Deal provides just such a blueprint for this worldwide undertaking. Written by Bernd Riexinger and his team in the German DIE LINKE [the left] Party, A Left Green New Deal unveils the powerful opponents of a genuine, left-wing Green New Deal—corporations, the wealthy, the ultra-rich and their political allies. But it also discloses the creation of a potent new counterforce, embodied in a left-wing mobilization strategy developed by DIE LINKE. This organizing model is based in "connective party politics"— transformative organizing practices that reach across class lines within and beyond the party. This essential book provides both a Left Green New Deal platform and the inspiration necessary to lay a path towards an alternate future.

Bernd Riexinger, co-leader of the German political party DIE LINKE since 2012, has roots in Stuttgart region's service sector union “ver.di.” Lia Becker, a strategic advisor for DIE LINKE since 2014, is co-author of Bite back! Queere Prekarität, Klasse und unteilbare Solidarität, a book about queer class-politics, forthcoming from Edition Assemblage. Katharina Dahme, the head of Riexinger's office, is one of the founders of “Bewegungslinke," a movement-oriented, anti-racist and ecosocialist network within DIE LINKE.

Christina Kaindl, head of DIE LINKE's Department for Program and Strategy since 2012, was co-founder and first editor in chief of the review "LuXemburg" and is a longtime coordinator of the academic review "Das Argument."

January 2022 146 pages • 5 x 7.5 7 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781583679456 • $17.00S Cloth • 9781583679463 • $89.00X

Political Science