Category: Monthly Review Press /

Save Our Unions reviewed in LaborOnline

February 20, 2024

Labor law is outdated and rotten in the US, corporations have an inordinate amount of power, so it is rare that unions win or even strike these days. Solid activist leadership in our unions is rare in these last decades of concessionary bargaining and the sustained war on the working class. The lack of a class perspective by many Americans makes them susceptible to the ugliest sorts of manipulation against their own interests. Steve Early has seen much of it and described it in a clear-eyed fashion in his latest book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review 2013). It should be read by unionists and their supporters and the more than 60% of Americans who pollsters say would like to be unionized.

Sept. 25: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaks in New York City

February 20, 2024

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a long-time contributor to and friend of Monthly Review, will be discussing her new book An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States at Bluestockings Books in New York City, on Thursday, September 25, 7pm.

NEW! E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics by E. P. Thompson, edited by Cal Winslow

February 20, 2024

The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 during one of the most fertile periods of E. P. Thompson's intellectual and political life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making of the English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. They reveal Thompson's insistence on the vitality of a humanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopian thinking in radical politics. Throughout, Thompson struggles to open a space independent of official Communist Parties and reformist Social Democratic Parties, opposing them with a vision of socialism built from the bottom up. Editor Cal Winslow, who studied with Thompson, provides context for the essays in a detailed introduction and reminds us why this eloquent and inspiring voice remains so relevant to us today.

Steve Early interviewed in Healthcare-NOW!

February 20, 2024

Question 1: Both your new book Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress - and your previous one, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor - draw on your experience as a union negotiator and longtime single payer activist. In 2008, liberal foundations, major unions, and the AFL-CIO created and financed Health Care for American Now! (HCAN). This lobbying coalition had a name similar to ours but it soon distanced itself from the goal of single payer. In retrospect, what impact did HCAN have on labor's quest for a better health care system?

John Bellamy Foster in NYC, Oct. 20

February 20, 2024

Join Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster for a discussion of his new book, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China, on October 20 at New York University.

Walter A. Rodney Book Launch and Film Screening in NYC

February 20, 2024

Join Clairmont Chung, editor of the new book Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution and director of the documentary W.A.R. Stories: Walter A. Rodney, for a book launch and film screening on Sunday, Dec. 2nd, 7:30pm, at the Maysles Institute in New York City.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

In this extraordinary book, Jeb Sprague has laid bare how paramilitarism has crushed the Haitian people's experiment in popular democracy, which began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This makes the book an essential read for anyone interested in Haitian politics as well as anyone concerned by how capital seeks to subvert democracy to its own ends through political destabilization and the disempowerment of the popular classes.

The Endless Crisis reviewed on Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

This is a most remarkable and important book. It is political economy at its best. It offers a sophisticated explanation of the socio-economic crisis facing the global and domestic economies. The authors further argue that the socio-economic crisis cannot be resolved without a total transformation away from the oligopolistic capitalistic system. The work of Foster and McChesney can be embraced by all heterodox political economy traditions.

NEW! Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality by Esteban Morales Domínguez

February 20, 2024

Esteban Morales Domínguez is one of Cuba's most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward.

The Contradictions of "Real Socialism" reviewed in International Critical Thought

February 20, 2024

In The Contradictions of Real Socialism Lebowitz provides an insightful and penetrating analysis of the problems with the 'vanguard' leadership and he offers a partial blueprint for the socialism of the future. This new type of socialism will be founded upon the full and democratic participation of the workers and its goal will be the production of richly developed human beings. While scholars of Marxism and socialism are likely to be more appreciative of the complexities and details of Lebowitz's book, its overall outlines are sufficiently clear to the general reader. Furthermore, this book seems to be intended not just for the socialist audience, but appears to be designed for an even larger group of readers. Anyone interested in the complimentary problems of real leadership and of involving workers in determining their own destinies will find Lebowitz's thought-provoking book of considerable interest.