On Bastille Day, July 14, 2005, Monthly Review Foundation bravely begins its most ambitious expansion ever, when we launch our new MR Webzine www.mrzine.org. “Bravely” since as a business matter our publications lose money, and (lacking any endowment or sponsor) we rely upon the contributions of our Friends and Associates to continue our work. In May, Monthly Review Foundation Director Bob McChesney wrote to our friends and contributors that now is the moment for MR to bring its analysis to the Internet via a Webzine with new content every day, and asked for their support. That support was forthcoming, and the Webzine is underway. Featuring articles much shorter than those in the magazine, the Webzine format permits a wider range of topics for comment, review, and discussion than the monthly magazine. We begin with the work of Monthly Review authors, but hope and expect that our community of readers and writers shall expand in tandem. Yoshie Furuhashi has joined our MR editorial team as “Webzine editor.” Yoshie, the daughter of working-class parents from Yamaguchi Prefecture (which borders Hiroshima), has been a lecturer in the English and Comparative Studies Departments of the College of Humanities, Ohio State University. She has an eager interest in creating an expanded Web presence—to make our work more useful, and the Monthly Review perspective more widely shared. She can be reached at (yoshie [at] monthlyreview.org) and welcomes contact from the MR community.
This issue of MR includes two essays submitted for the Daniel Singer Millennium Prize in 2004 (including the winning essay by Andrew Blackman), with an introduction about the Singer Prize by Monthly Review Foundation Director Percy Brazil. We would like to draw MR readers’ attention to a new book consisting of many of Daniel Singer’s essays entitled Deserter from Death: Dispatches from Western Europe 1950–2000, introduced by Howard Zinn and published in 2005 by Nation Books. Two of the pieces in the book are reprinted from Monthly Review. One of these is Daniel’s article “Why We Need a New Manifesto,” reprinted from the May 1988 issue of MR. The other is Percy’s very moving tribute to Daniel, “Remembering Daniel Singer,” from the February 2001 issue of MR, which is printed as an afterword to the book.
We are sad to announce the death on March 31 at age sixty-four of our friend Will Miller, a leading socialist teacher and activist at the University of Vermont. A tribute to Will by Ron Jacobs and Fred Magdoff has been posted on the MR Web site. It begins with the following:
In many parts of our country—in communities large and small—there are activists engaged in a wide range of struggles for social and economic justice. In some communities and states there is one person who stands out as a consistent force for social change. This person inspires others and provides continuity over the years. In Vermont, University of Vermont professor of philosophy Will Miller was such a major force for education and change—in local communities, at the university, and in the state. A committed socialist and Marxist, Will’s devotion to activism was inseparable from his role as a teacher. His devotion to change and knowledge and understanding of history and economics—and his willingness to discuss almost any issue at the drop of a hat—meant that he was an educator both inside and outside the classroom. Unlike most academics (radical or not), Will chose to concentrate on teaching and social change through various means instead of on publishing articles in scholarly journals.
We encourage MR readers to visit https://monthlyreview.org/0505jacobs.htm to read more of this moving tribute.
At the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia this August the Marxist Section of the ASA is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. We would like to offer our congratulations for three decades of struggle, never easy for radicals in the university, and our support in the struggles that are yet to come.
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