Category: Monthly Review Press /

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed by International Viewpoint

February 20, 2024

This new book, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, by Paul LeBlanc and Michael Yates looks back at a piece of history from the Civil Rights Revolution that gets little if any mention today. It's a time worth revisiting as the proposals offered in the Freedom Budget remain unfulfilled. The Freedom Budget for All Americans was issued at a broadly endorsed conference in 1966. It was initiated by civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute with funding from the AFL-CIO. The objective was to keep the momentum after the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid reviewed in the Daily Maverick

February 20, 2024

As 2013 bled into 2014, I read two books that on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. Yet they led me to a startling realisation that made me think perhaps they should be set reading for all South Africans ... a 'history' that should be recognised as a definitive account of the struggle era and some of its key actors, is the recently published Joe Slovo and Ruth First in the War against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder.

Steve Early discusses Save Our Unions on Alternative Visions Radio

February 20, 2024

Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress, recently published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Dr. Jack Rasmus, discussing the strategic implications of the past four decades of partial victories, and numerous defeats, suffered by union labor in America, and what 'needs to be done' going forward if unions are to rise again to play the economic and social role in the future they once did in the past.

Save Our Unions reviewed in CounterPunch

February 20, 2024

There is still time during the holidays to purchase labor journalist Steve Early's very readable and quite reflective latest book, Save Our Unions, published by Monthly Review Press. But books on labor are notoriously misunderstood and conspicuously undersold. This is really too bad. Like other books describing how people live and what they struggle for, Save Our Union records a very human story – a running narrative from an author who was directly reporting, and often directly participating, in the unfolding human drama as it occurred.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid reviewed in the Morning Star

February 20, 2024

Alan Wieder has put his oral history expertise together with already existing material on Ruth First and Joe Slovo to construct a remarkable record of these two heroes of South African emancipation. When Nelson Mandela went to Camden Town's Lyme Street to unveil a blue plaque on the house where they lived in exile from 1966 to 1978, he noted their description as freedom fighters. "This means they were Communists," he explained to his audience, for some of whom this bluntly positive assessment of a political current that was supposed to be over and done was a little disquieting.

Henry Giroux interviewed on Greed for Ilm podcast

February 20, 2024

Henry Giroux is the author of America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, published recently by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Walid Darab for the Greed For Ilm podcast, discussing his book, "casino capitalism," three examples of the war on youth, his recent appearance on Bill Moyers, and more.

Registering Class reviewed in The Spokesman

February 20, 2024

The Socialist Register 2014 is the 50th edition of the journal which was founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in 1964 to advance socialist analysis and discussion. It was an offshoot of the New Left, but reflected a different approach from that of the New Left Review editors, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. Over the years, it has produced a rich collection of contributions on socialist ideas.

Save Our Unions reviewed in Labor Notes

February 20, 2024

Reading Save our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress is like sitting in on a seminar on the modern labor movement—with Steve Early playing the role of opinionated professor. Research has confirmed that we learn best when we are hearing stories. So the prolific Professor Early wisely builds his Save Our Unions seminar around case studies of labor's triumphs and tragedies, past and present.

Back in Print! Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan by Makoto Itoh

February 20, 2024

Value and Crisis opens with a long and highly informative essay on the development of Marxian economics in Japan, and contains a number of the author's important and original contributions to this stream of thought. Itoh discusses the major points of view on Marx's theory of value, on theories of crisis, and on problems of Marx's theory of market value. The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging familiarity with all the major theoretical schools of Marxist thought. In dealing with theories of crisis, for example, Itoh succinctly summarizes and criticizes the points of view of Tugan-Baranovsky, Hilferding, Bauer, Kautsky, Bukharin, and Luxemburg, as well as Grossman, Sweezy, and the Japanese Marxist Kozo Uno, together with the relevant parts of Capital. The book includes a section on the 1930s Great Depression in the context of the theoretical discussion about crisis theory.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid reviewed in The Washington Socialist

February 20, 2024

As the world was saying goodbye to Nelson Mandela in early December, I had my nose in Alan Wieder's well-researched new biography Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid (Monthly Review, 2013). First, Slovo and Mandela were part of an ensemble of revolutionary comrades who together reshaped South Africa from the 1950s to the end of apartheid in 1991. The book is full of these and other familiar characters in a level of detail that would impress the most ardent Talmudic scholar. Wieder's research involved hours and hours of interviews and immersing himself in court records, other documents and the personal papers of Slovo, First and others from the apartheid era.