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Socialist author and activist Helena Sheehan opened the 2024 Red Flag Festival with readings from her books and reflections on her life in the Labour movement that has spanned more than seven decades.

A brilliant theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was also a socialist. John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

Sam Falcone pays tribute to the great life of Martin Stolar. We at Monthly Review appreciated and loved him, and mourn his death.

One can hate or admire any of the gentlemen now involved [in the push for peace in Ukraine]; I would endorse Satan himself if he could help end this God-awful war and move towards the urgently-needed peace in the area—and elsewhere.

Andy Merrifield went to Sardinia searching for Gramsci’s phantom. We can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the axe. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again.

Money on the Left is joined by Dr. Chris Martin to discuss Modern Monetary Theory’s vital importance for the struggle to provide adequate housing for all. A Senior Research Fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Martin is a long-time tenant’s rights advocate in Australia with scholarly training in law and heterodox political economy. We speak with Martin about this report and its reception in Australian housing policy debates. We also ruminate about what housing-for-all movements in Australia, the US, and across the world stand to learn from each other. 

[Britannica’s revisionist] distortions of the history of the Vietnamese struggle are just as radical and just as misleading [as those about the Soviet Union]. Here we may draw some valuable lessons about the hidden content of form: how apparently neutral principles of organization may shape meaning.

The DRC’s vast mineral wealth contrasts with its extreme poverty, caused by exploitation and conflict. The dossier emphasises sovereignty and dignity, echoing Congolese activists’ visions for freedom.

As there can only be one price standard in any functioning economic system the transition from one price standard to another cannot take place gradually, or in a mixed way, but must take place sharply, and therefore completely in a very short time frame.

Far from water-logged Bavaria, immensely worse destruction is bloodily wrecking two million lives, and with Germany, though so distant, deeply involved. Of course I mean Palestine, especially Gaza. For decades the media has distorted or ignored what has been happening there. After October 7th ignoring it was no longer possible, here or anywhere.

Andrew J. Douglas, political theorist and professor of political science at Morehouse College, joins Money on the Left to discuss his latest article, “Modern Money and the Black University Concept,” published April 19, 2024, in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. 

In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced civilizations.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a Texan farmworker infected with HPAI H5N1. He suffered the hemorrhaging in the eye the cows he tended expressed.

This dossier looks at how the U.S.-led New Cold War against China is destabilizing Northeast Asia, focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan Strait, and Japan.

As a former college teacher, one who witnessed the attacks on those who protested against the War in Vietnam and who studied the repression on campuses during the McCarthy period, I became so appalled at what was being done to our brave and courageous college students that I began to write letters to the leaders of what are, in reality, academic enterprises.

Superficially in the recent period the U.S. has attempted to display two apparently contradictory sides of its policy to China.

Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art. 

It was May 10^th in Germany’s terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire.… No books were burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too alarming!

John Green on the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.