February 20, 2024
Join Monthly Review Press author John Tully for the Launch of his new book Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement, on Wednesday, March 5, at The VU Bar at Footscray Park campus, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. He will be joined by distinguished historian Stuart Macintyre and Victoria University colleague Phillip Deery.
February 20, 2024
In comparison to other books and their focus on education reform, Giroux (McMaster Univ., Canada) provides a much more poignant and global perspective on the social and political disenfranchisement of today’s youth and how the social and political impact education (and vice versa). Such issues are honed (almost) exclusively with a concern for youth from impoverished and/or diverse backgrounds, but done so with fairness and well-sustained arguments. Throughout the book, Giroux maintains a methodical approach to the discussion and cites specific and (surprisingly) contemporary examples of skewed social perceptions of youth from diverse backgrounds (e.g., hoodie politics).
February 20, 2024
The authors, eminent representatives of the Monthly Review or monopoly capital school, argue that giant corporations, not free or efficient markets, dominate the economy. We live in a perverse world where powerful firms extract high profits but this becomes an economic problem as core national economies suffer from weak final demand, industrial overcapacity, and lack of investment. Foster and McChesney also challenge nationalist perspectives, insisting the economy should be conceived as a global whole.
February 20, 2024
On 11 February 2011, newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced a Budget Repair Bill in the Wisconsin legislature that sought to balance the state budget by eliminating collective bargaining for all public employees except police and firefighters. Workers in both the public and the private sector were outraged… These events are well known. But contributors to the new essay collection Wisconsin Uprising enrich this story with detailed first-hand accounts, context and analysis from longtime observers of the labour movement, and examples from across the country of how that movement might broaden and deepen the struggle that began anew in Wisconsin. They face the complex task of analyzing a new moment in history from a recent vantage point, and they succeed admirably.
February 20, 2024
For fifty years, the Socialist Register has brought together some of the world’s leading radical thinkers to address the most pressing issues of the day. Independent, searching, and erudite analysis is the hallmark of the Socialist Register, and this fiftieth-anniversary issue is no exception. Contributors to Registering Class examine some of our assumptions about class in the light of the global economic crisis and the many forms of resistance it has produced. Furthermore, they address how capitalist classes are reorganizing to respond to the economic turmoil and how the structure and composition of working classes in the twenty-first century are also changing. This volume captures the essence of the Socialist Register project and is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the shifting realities of class and class struggle today.
February 20, 2024
This new book, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, by Paul LeBlanc and Michael Yates looks back at a piece of history from the Civil Rights Revolution that gets little if any mention today. It’s a time worth revisiting as the proposals offered in the Freedom Budget remain unfulfilled. The Freedom Budget for All Americans was issued at a broadly endorsed conference in 1966. It was initiated by civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute with funding from the AFL-CIO. The objective was to keep the momentum after the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.
February 20, 2024
As 2013 bled into 2014, I read two books that on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. Yet they led me to a startling realisation that made me think perhaps they should be set reading for all South Africans … a ‘history’ that should be recognised as a definitive account of the struggle era and some of its key actors, is the recently published Joe Slovo and Ruth First in the War against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder.
February 20, 2024
Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress, recently published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Dr. Jack Rasmus, discussing the strategic implications of the past four decades of partial victories, and numerous defeats, suffered by union labor in America, and what ‘needs to be done’ going forward if unions are to rise again to play the economic and social role in the future they once did in the past.
February 20, 2024
There is still time during the holidays to purchase labor journalist Steve Early’s very readable and quite reflective latest book, Save Our Unions, published by Monthly Review Press. But books on labor are notoriously misunderstood and conspicuously undersold. This is really too bad. Like other books describing how people live and what they struggle for, Save Our Union records a very human story – a running narrative from an author who was directly reporting, and often directly participating, in the unfolding human drama as it occurred.
February 20, 2024
Alan Wieder has put his oral history expertise together with already existing material on Ruth First and Joe Slovo to construct a remarkable record of these two heroes of South African emancipation. When Nelson Mandela went to Camden Town’s Lyme Street to unveil a blue plaque on the house where they lived in exile from 1966 to 1978, he noted their description as freedom fighters. “This means they were Communists,” he explained to his audience, for some of whom this bluntly positive assessment of a political current that was supposed to be over and done was a little disquieting.
