Tag: News

Silvertown reviewed by Counterfire

Silvertown reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Tully’s account is very readable. He is able to connect the features of the strike to the wider historical period and uses quotations from great thinkers such as Marx to explain the barbarity of the system and the actions of its participants. He rescues from obscurity the working-class fighters who made their mark, such as the strike leader Fred Ling whose energy and willingness to learn inspired Eleanor Marx; and the landlady of the Railway Tavern, Mrs Cundy, who let the pub be used as a strike HQ. Tully does an excellent job of introducing the reader unfamiliar with the history of the East End to the workers’ leaders: Tom Mann, Will Thorne, and especially to Eleanor Marx.

NEW! Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography by Tamás Krausz

NEW! Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography by Tamás Krausz

February 20, 2024

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually-existing” socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that.

Race to Revolution reviewed in the Progressive Populist

Race to Revolution reviewed in the Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne (Monthly Review Press, June 2014) enters a crucial, if little known, period of chattel bondage and its aftermath for islanders and mainlanders. What people of African descent do and say to be free is his special focus. Horne leaves mainstream history in the starting blocks. His book is a guided tour of people freeing themselves on both sides of the Florida Straits. He fleshes out that history. It should inform the current phase of relations between Uncle Sam and Cuba. The book’s context flows from the centrality of the slave trade and traders to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “world-system.” In Spanish Florida and Cuba, antebellum and post-bellum America, skin color signifies class status, creating and challenging the dominant political economy.

“Women Write About Che” by Nancy Stout, author of One Day in December

“Women Write About Che” by Nancy Stout, author of One Day in December

February 20, 2024

In the last five years, three women have written biographies of Ernesto “Che” Guevara after five decades of his life story being solidly in the hands of men. The question is: do women write biography differently? Lucia Alvarez de Toledo is the most explicit about the issue of being a woman biographer. She points out that The Story of Che Guevara (Harper Collins, 2011), has been written by a Latin American, a native of Buenos Aires and a woman. Whatever the advantages of those territorial factors, it seems clear that her account benefits as well from her talent for critical analysis and willingness to go over old territory to find facts anew. No less important is its vantage point: a woman’s point of view. Partly because Alvarez was her subject’s contemporary and compatriot, this biography provides interesting details of and insights into Che’s youth and the environment that shaped him, information either unknown to or ignored by earlier biographers.

Read an excerpt from Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century in Truthout

February 20, 2024

These are perilous times for capitalism, the reigning political economic system of the United States and the world. The economy is stagnating, and Mother Earth is gravely ill. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, we face widening economic inequality, plutocratic governance, endless militarism and mounting planetary ecological degradation. Not many years ago, this would have sounded hyperbolic to many people. But today, it is not just radicals who are sounding alarm bells.

Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis reviewed in Choice

Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis reviewed in Choice

February 20, 2024

In this volume, Screpanti (Univ. of Siena, Italy) offers a Marxist-inspired interpretation of the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that began in 2007. The author argues that the principal actors in the global economy are multinational firms and that, despite appearances to the contrary, national governments and international organizations largely serve their interests, while the citizens of the world are left to suffer the consequences.

9/21: MR Press at the Brooklyn Book Festival (plus talk and signing with Alan Wieder)

9/21: MR Press at the Brooklyn Book Festival (plus talk and signing with Alan Wieder)

February 20, 2024

Visit the MR Press table at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival, on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014, 10am—6pm, at Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza. Alan Wieder, author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid, will be at the MRP table for a book signing at 10:30 AM, and will be participating in a festival panel discussion at noon, “Mandela: An American Perspective.” We hope to see you there!

9/20: John Bellamy Foster & Fred Magdoff at the NYC Climate Convergence

9/20: John Bellamy Foster & Fred Magdoff at the NYC Climate Convergence

February 20, 2024

Before corporate and governmental leaders arrive in New York City this September for the UN Climate Summit, System Change Not Climate Change together with the Global Climate Convergence will be laying the groundwork for an alternative summit: the New York City Climate Convergence. The objective is to build and strengthen an environmental movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crises; a social-economic system that values profits above people, planet and peace. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff will be speaking on Saturday, September 20, at St. John’s University.

Registering Class reviewed in The Progressive Populist

Registering Class reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber edit probing essays in “Registering Class: Socialist Register 2014”. Contributors focus in part on the economics and politics of workers’ fragmentation. Capital’s constant breaking up of the laboring class and its re-composition is a recurring theme throughout. Merchant capital looms large.

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