“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
“In 2020, Blacks owned less than 3 percent of American businesses. Even this was misleading. The bulk of them were still mom-and-pop sole proprietorships, with one or two employees”…. | more…
A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from biotechnology exports is down. | more…
Gabriel Rockhill y Jennifer Ponce de León han escrito la Introducción a la versión inglesa de El Marxismo Occidental, titulada “El socialismo como liberación anti-colonial: lecciones contemporáneas de Losurdo”, en la que no sólo delinean las ideas-fuerza de Losurdo y el método de análisis que aplica en esta obra, sino que también ofrecen interesantes reflexiones sobre la “industria de la teoría” y el “socialismo realmente existente”…. | more…
Cabral goes so far as to ask whether in fact ‘the national liberation movement is not an imperialist initiative’ since he judges the character of the struggle as tending to bring the petit bourgeoisie to power…. | more…
Losurdo’s key move is to contrast ‘Western Marxism’ systematically with an ‘Eastern Marxism’, presented as its productive antithesis. The Western variant, Losurdo agrees with other accounts, was born out of a reaction against the slaughter of the First World War, and the magnetism of the revolution in Russia. The outlook of its earliest thinkers—Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin—was, however, from the outset impregnated with a set of themes that went back to the anarchism of Bakunin’s time: notably a hostility to science, associated with capitalism, and to the state of any kind, associated with tyranny. To these it added a messianic streak of eschatological expectation, inherited from a judeo-christian past, that looked forward to salvation for humanity in communism, conceived as the proximate coming of a classless society in which money and the state would disappear. Such utopian hopes vested in a beleaguered USSR were bound to be disappointed…. | more…
As Reiman documents, the union’s reform faction then faced continuing resistance from well entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. In 1996, the still-powerful local officialdom, which backed two competing “Old Guard” candidates five years earlier, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge to Carey. It was fronted by a local union lawyer with the most famous last name in Teamsterdom…. | more…
“The book under review furnishes ample proof that professional historians do not have the market cornered on rigorous historical method, and the most fascinating portions of Batterson’s brilliant book draw on reasoning methods that may be common to mathematicians but elude the practitioners of other disciplines….” –The Historian | more…
When I use the word “violence,” I do not mean random killing of those you oppose. Rather, I mean violence embedded in a radical political program. If a political group targets certain colonial or imperial leaders who are raining misery on their people with assassination, this is a legitimate use of violence. | more…
“Domitila’s book serves as an example, a living testimony, of what it means to fight for democracy; that is, democracy not only as the right to vote every five years, but also the right to associate, to think, to organize, and discuss fundamental issues, such as salary, rights, constitutional guarantees, and party politics, in one’s community. This is democracy as a continuous and daily affair, an everyday practice…” -From the Foreword to the Argentine edition | more…
I wasn’t a terrorist—just a journalist, which, in Israel’s eyes, is almost as bad….Everything people learn in journalism school about risk management and safety in the field feels like mere theories on paper in Gaza. Being a journalist during this war means continuing to write your story with one hand on your phone because the second air strike on the targeted residential area scattered metal and glass shrapnel in your arm and destroyed your laptop. It means waiting for the drone to lift higher in the sky so you can escape its surveillance radar and bullets that target every moving object, especially those marked with “PRESS” on their chests… | more…
While Mina, Sofie, and the other Jewish residents knelt in front of the synagogue, one of the Nazis threw a match onto the gasoline-soaked floor of the building. As the synagogue burned, Judenberg’s residents were ordered to shout, “We are burning the synagogue! We are burning the synagogue!” Mina and other Judenberg residents cried bitterly as they watched the building that was so central to the life of their close-knit community burn to ashes…. | more…
