February 20, 2024
Robert McChesney, Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, has a new book out, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy. McChesney talks about the book on the January 29, 2015 edition of Tell Somebody.
February 20, 2024
Cal Winslow's thoughtful introduction to a selection of brilliant essays by Thompson summarises his quest for a new humanist socialist politics. This saw Thompson at the heart of working class self education (himself teaching in adult education) and facilitating 'new left clubs', with forensic historical research into the lives of working people producing The Making of the English Working Class (TMTEWC), the biography of William Morris & 'Homage to Tom Maguire' amongst others.
February 20, 2024
Tully's account is very readable. He is able to connect the features of the strike to the wider historical period and uses quotations from great thinkers such as Marx to explain the barbarity of the system and the actions of its participants. He rescues from obscurity the working-class fighters who made their mark, such as the strike leader Fred Ling whose energy and willingness to learn inspired Eleanor Marx; and the landlady of the Railway Tavern, Mrs Cundy, who let the pub be used as a strike HQ. Tully does an excellent job of introducing the reader unfamiliar with the history of the East End to the workers' leaders: Tom Mann, Will Thorne, and especially to Eleanor Marx.
February 20, 2024
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and "actually-existing" socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that.
February 20, 2024
Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne (Monthly Review Press, June 2014) enters a crucial, if little known, period of chattel bondage and its aftermath for islanders and mainlanders. What people of African descent do and say to be free is his special focus. Horne leaves mainstream history in the starting blocks. His book is a guided tour of people freeing themselves on both sides of the Florida Straits. He fleshes out that history. It should inform the current phase of relations between Uncle Sam and Cuba. The book's context flows from the centrality of the slave trade and traders to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the "world-system." In Spanish Florida and Cuba, antebellum and post-bellum America, skin color signifies class status, creating and challenging the dominant political economy.
February 20, 2024
In its detailed analysis of the production of everyday life in the Middle West Side and its overall combination of spatial theory and historical research, Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space is a solid contribution to urban studies and a welcome addition to the sociological literature on New York City.
February 20, 2024
In the last five years, three women have written biographies of Ernesto "Che" Guevara after five decades of his life story being solidly in the hands of men. The question is: do women write biography differently? Lucia Alvarez de Toledo is the most explicit about the issue of being a woman biographer. She points out that The Story of Che Guevara (Harper Collins, 2011), has been written by a Latin American, a native of Buenos Aires and a woman. Whatever the advantages of those territorial factors, it seems clear that her account benefits as well from her talent for critical analysis and willingness to go over old territory to find facts anew. No less important is its vantage point: a woman's point of view. Partly because Alvarez was her subject's contemporary and compatriot, this biography provides interesting details of and insights into Che's youth and the environment that shaped him, information either unknown to or ignored by earlier biographers.
February 20, 2024
These are perilous times for capitalism, the reigning political economic system of the United States and the world. The economy is stagnating, and Mother Earth is gravely ill. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, we face widening economic inequality, plutocratic governance, endless militarism and mounting planetary ecological degradation. Not many years ago, this would have sounded hyperbolic to many people. But today, it is not just radicals who are sounding alarm bells.
February 20, 2024
In this volume, Screpanti (Univ. of Siena, Italy) offers a Marxist-inspired interpretation of the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that began in 2007. The author argues that the principal actors in the global economy are multinational firms and that, despite appearances to the contrary, national governments and international organizations largely serve their interests, while the citizens of the world are left to suffer the consequences.
February 20, 2024
Visit the MR Press table at this year's Brooklyn Book Festival, on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014, 10am—6pm, at Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza. Alan Wieder, author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid, will be at the MRP table for a book signing at 10:30 AM, and will be participating in a festival panel discussion at noon, "Mandela: An American Perspective." We hope to see you there!
