February 20, 2024
In a post-9/11 world, a “new normal” exists in the US. It tilts in no small way towards the power of government’s three branches. The trio focuses, almost obsessively, on national safety and security. Against that backdrop, Albert Ruben’s new book amplifies the strengths and weaknesses of a progressive institution involved in civil liberties and human rights struggles for nearly five decades.
February 20, 2024
Ecological degradation is the elephant in the room for many people; they are aware of its presence yet would prefer to ignore it rather than be forced to consider both its severity and possible remedies. This practiced ignorance occurs despite numerous problems, such as global climate change, species extinction, deforestation, overfishing, and dramatic disasters such as the recent oil “spill” from offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation releases from nuclear power plants in post-tsunami Japan. This elephant is enormous, destructive, and cannot be imagined away. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York have been taking on the elephant for years.
February 20, 2024
In general, college professors are not particularly well-regarded as political analysts (the noun “academic” is a term of unvarnished contempt in precincts like FOX news). But there is a special circle of irrelevance reserved for English professors, who are not typically known for their quantitative acumen — or, for that matter, their ability to write in a language the rest of us understand. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this book by John Marsh, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Amazingly, I encountered a work of deft econometrics. Even more amazing, it’s clear, lively, and realistic.
February 20, 2024
Alan Wieder has done a wonderful service in researching and writing such a detailed, well constructed narrative, setting the intertwined personal histories in the context of the long and difficult struggle against apartheid. Based on extensive reading of relevant literature, much enriched by interviews, as befits an oral historian, this book provides many new insights to those of us who only knew a part of the lives of Ruth First and Joe Slovo.
February 20, 2024
Long overdue in the catalog of books on the Cuban Revolution, Nancy Stout’s One Day in December has made an important contribution to the study of the guerrilla insurrection and Fidel’s Cuba by presenting Celia Sánchez Manduley as one of the Revolution’s key players. Stout sheds light on and pays well deserved homage to this valiant and fiercely strong-minded Cuban female revolutionary, who remains hardly known outside of Cuba.
February 20, 2024
Join Monthly Review and many others from around the world at this year’s Left Forum conference at John Jay College, the City University of New York, May 30 to June 1. Left Forum is the largest annual gathering of left activists and scholars in the United States. This year’s theme is “Reform and/or Revolution: Imagine a World of Transformative Justice.” Please click here for more information on MR-sponsored and related panels, and don’t forget to visit the Monthly Review Press table for discounts on a wide range of MR Press titles, new and old!
February 20, 2024
Join us for a discussion of workers’ movements in the U.S. and abroad with Steve Early and Manny Ness on Wednesday, June 4, 6:30 to 8 P.M. at the NWU/UAW Hall in New York City. Former CWA organizer Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress and Manny Ness, professor of political science at Brooklyn College/CUNY is the editor of New Forms of Worker Organization.
February 20, 2024
Dear Friend of Monthly Review: In the past few years world conditions have changed far more than most people realize. Since the financial collapse of 2007–2008, capitalism has entered a period of pronounced stagnation. The dismal recovery of the past six years is no longer to be regarded as a temporary adjustment; it is the new normal. What this means for the great mass of people in the United States and the globe is also clear: increasing poverty and unemployment; gaping increases in inequality; tremendous downward pressure on wages and benefits; collapsing infrastructure and decline in public services; systematic political corruption; environmental degradation in the pursuit of profit; and endless militarism. Capitalism is a system that gives every sign of being on its last legs. It is eating the future to stay alive today.
February 20, 2024
Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by C. J. Polychroniou, who writes for Eleftherotypia in Greece. “What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive.”
February 20, 2024
Steve Early is the author of Save our Unions, published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Mike Elk for Working In These Times, who writes: “At time when the labor beat was disappearing from mainstream publications, Early’s writing formed a valuable body of work that inspired many young writers—myself included—to stick with the profession through its highs and lows.”
