August 12, 2026
From the Preface to the new edition of The Rainbow Challenge: Jesse Jackson’s first presidential primary race in 1984 should have been a wakeup call for the Democratic Party. Without... READ MORE
August 12, 2026
The latest: The title of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book "derives from Lucretius’s famed De Rerum Natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius wrote: “Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order – if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will break the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect – what is the source of the free [will] … .” ([On the Nature of Things,] Book II, 251ff) This exact quotation, moreover, was one made by Karl Marx in his Epicurean Notebooks, compiled in preparation for his doctoral thesis: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” of 1841. From this point of departure, Foster initiates the reappraisal of two thousand years of philosophical controversy...."
August 10, 2026
The latest: "During the 1960s and 1970s, it was an oft-repeated quip that the European left was long on theory and short on practice, while the North American left was strong on action, but allergic to theory...."
July 2, 2026
The latest: "....Is 'subaltern' a code for the working classes? Is 'hegemony' an economic force or a cultural power? Are 'organic intellectuals' inherently more progressive? The answers to such questions depend upon your choice of scholar—whether, say, you’re reading a Foucauldian literary critic or a Marxist sociologist, a subaltern historian or a posthuman anthropologist. Over the years, Gramsci’s writing has been polished by critics of such diverse persuasions that it has now become a mirror: One opens his books only to confirm one’s own beliefs....when the English writer Andy Merrifield arrived in Rome, feeling 'washed out intellectually,' Gramsci came to the rescue...."
July 1, 2026
The latest: ""....To keep track of the multitudinous political figures and organizations featured in the book, the author helpfully provides a glossary of detailed biographical and organizational profiles. It was an age prolific especially of government acronyms and of faceless bureaucrats charged with keeping Americans as misinformed as possible about the true state of the world. Eric Chester has written an ambitious book about momentous government initiatives to quell antiwar opposition...."March 30, 2026
The latest from Mohammed Mhawish: "We have to ask ourselves: Do we know Hind? Of course we’ve heard her voice, or maybe have seen the building someone renamed after her at Columbia in her honor — which matters, and which she would have deserved, and which is still not the same as knowing her. But do we know her laughter, the way she moved through a room, what she was afraid of, what she loved, the world she was building inside herself at six years old? We learn none of it from the film. We learn it, if we learn it at all, from the interviews her mother gave on the side, on other people’s platforms. The film that claims her voice does not make space for her life."March 10, 2026
Bruce Neuburger (author of the recent book, Postcards to Hitler), wrote to MRP recently to remind us about the incredible efforts of Chicano farmworkers to gain their rights, described in... READ MORE