Tag: Reviews

Fascinating blow by blow on the Cuban workers’ parliaments (Pedro Ross reviewed for ‘New West Indian Guide’)

February 20, 2024

Mass meetings took place in 80,000 workplaces, neighborhood committees, farmers’ organisations, and the Federation of Cuban Women. These acted as a two-way conduit, informing the workers and farmers of the reality of the situation while, at the same time, allowing for votes on different options, all unpalatable, but some more acceptable than others. By giving ordinary people a direct say and a stake in the solution of the crisis, the Workers’ Parliaments brought back a commitment to the social gains of the Revolution and enabled Cuban society to slowly emerge from the “Special Period.”

Novel as biography (Radek reviewed in ‘Against the Current’)

February 20, 2024

In his 1995 novel Radek, published in English translation for the first time last year by Monthly Review Press, Stefan Heym portrays Karl Radek as not only a man of the world but a perpetual outsider — a socially awkward contrarian with stereotypically Jewish features, thick glasses and a big mouth. In this, Heym likely saw in Karl Radek something of a kindred spirit.

A slim book with profound impact (The Dialectics of Dependency reviewed in ‘Marx & Philosophy Review of Books’)

February 20, 2024

Dependency theory emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to explain the development of Latin America in its dependent relationship with advanced capitalist economies, the US in particular. It served a practical purpose of orienting Latin American Marxists in the revolutionary struggles of that period, following the inspiration of the Cuban revolution and the crises across the region in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, amongst others.

An inspiration and a warning (Ross’ How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution reviewed in ‘Morning Star’)

February 20, 2024

Cuba’s continuing economic crisis has produced a social malaise that manifests itself in many ways. One of them has been a political detachment including a decrease in political and electoral participation. Ross’s account of Cuba’s survival is at the same time an inspiration to everyone struggling for socialism, and a warning of the challenges to be faced in building it…

Stabilising the human relation to the earth (Capitalism in the Anthropocene reviewed in ‘Morning Star’)

Stabilising the human relation to the earth (Capitalism in the Anthropocene reviewed in ‘Morning Star’)

February 20, 2024

Geological epochs are divided into ages. So far the Anthropocene has been dominated by a globalised system of capitalist accumulation. Foster proposes the designation Capitalinian for this first geological age of the Anthropocene in the hope that it may be superseded by another; one “stabilizing the human relation to the earth” the Communian, rather than “an end-Anthropocene extinction event resulting in the destruction of civilization and quite possibly humanity itself.”

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