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EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People)

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 now offering free 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…

Walk This Way (Anne Braden Speaks in ‘The Progressive Populist’)

“Her perspective as an anti-racial capitalism activist and writer gives her a comprehensive, dare I say a dialectical, analysis of domestic and foreign policies. The bombs that Uncle Sam dropped on the people of Vietnam also exploded on Americans living in urban and rural communities experiencing poverty, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to understand in no small part because of Braden’s advocacy.” -Seth Sandronsky | more…

A blue collar biography of a Union President, rooted in firsthand experience (Ron Carey and the Teamsters in ‘Portside’, ‘Counterpunch’, ‘Popular Resistance’, ‘ZMag,’ ‘In These Times’ and more)

Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in “Putting Members First,” is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition builder with other reformers. Last, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power, and personal fiefdoms. Read on for some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles…. | more…

Until We Fall: “A contribution to…the history of the subaltern”

ncounters with many characters involved in left wing politics are recorded in such a way that make the reader feel more like a participant than an observer. Helena weaves anecdotes into a broader record of events, and in doing so brings them to life. She also puts on the record her many decades of involvement in politics outside of Ireland, and one would wonder how she managed to find the time to pack so much into her life and work. | more…

The Cuban revolution differed from the Stalinist regimes (How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

By examining the Special Period that Cuba went through, Ross gives us an example of how during periods of austerity, workers do not and should not need to pay the price of the crisis. For those who still think that Cuba is far from their ideal, I would like to paraphrase Marx. In theory, we assume that the laws of the socialist mode of production develop in their pure form. In reality, this is only an approximation; the approximation is all the more exact, the more socialism is developed and the less it is adulterated by survivals of earlier economic conditions with which it is amalgamated. | more…