Category: Monthly Review Press /

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed in the Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

What do we know about recent progressive reform in the US? Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have answers for the current moment in A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today. The authors take a critical look at the Freedom Budget of 1966. If this is new to you, read on. The Freedom Budget was "a practical step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty in America during the next 10 years." Since private business was not up to the task, government spending would bridge the gap.

The Work of Sartre reviewed in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

The 2012 release, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, delivers the long-awaited final section of Mészáros' 1979 study on Sartre's work. Originally intended to constitute a second volume, the analysis of Sartre's conception of history now serves to expand and complete the original text. The stated purpose of this new edition is to fill a political lacuna inadequately addressed by postmodernism and post-structuralism, to resurrect from its bourgeois determinations the dignity of the notion of individual responsibility championed by Sartre, to pay the debt owed to Sartre by Marxists. In a time when "the future seems to be fatefully barred by capitalism's deepening crisis", a retrieval of the power of radical negation seems necessary so that we can admit with Sartre that "a barred future is still a future."

Monthly Review Holiday Party in NYC

February 20, 2024

Please join us for a Holiday Party at the Monthly Review office in New York City, on Wednesday, December 11, 5:30 to 8:30 pm, at 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W, (between 6th and 7th avenues). No rsvp required.

Fred Magdoff interviewed on Mud and Water Radio

February 20, 2024

Throughout the world, multinational firms, private investors and state corporations are buying agricultural land. Fred Magdoff is the author of the recent article "21st Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession," published in the November 2013 issue of Monthly Review. He is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He was interviewed on the radio show Mud and Water, broadcast by CKUW in Winnipeg, Canada.

Capitalist Globalization reviewed by Systemic Disorder

February 20, 2024

Corporate globalization is an international phenomenon by definition that is commonly opposed on nationalist lines. A process embedded in capitalist competition and advanced by the industrialists and financiers who directly benefit from it, however, transcends borders. Understanding corporate globalization is necessary to developing strategies to effectively counter it, and relying on nationalist arguments is a barrier to grasping the systemic nature of globalization, argues Martin Hart-Landsberg in his just released book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance and Alternatives.

Henry Giroux Video Interview with Truthout

February 20, 2024

Henry Giroux is the author of America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, recently published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Ted Asregadoo of Truthout in this video, published on August 22, 2013.

Michael Heinrich interviewed by Xiaoping Wei

February 20, 2024

Michael Heinrich is the author of An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx's Capital, published last year by Monthly Review Press. Here, he discusses his work and his interpretation of Capital with Xiaoping Wei, director of History of Marxism Philosophy in the Philosophy Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, vice-director of History of Marxism Philosophy Society of China, and vice-director of Western Marxism Society of China.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans in the Washington Post

February 20, 2024

As two excellent new books about the march and the men and women who made it happen — "The March on Washington" by William P. Jones and "A Freedom Budget for All Americans" by Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates — make clear, the march was initially conceived in late 1962 primarily to spotlight the growing unemployment, underemployment and job discrimination plaguing African Americans in northern cities. Only when all hell broke loose in Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of 1963 — with Bull Connor loosing attack dogs on black schoolchildren demonstrating for equal access to public accommodations — did the focus of the march expand to the civil rights demands with which it is linked in popular memory today.

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed by Resolute Reader

February 20, 2024

In the period this book considered, Hell's Kitchen, or "Manhattan's Middle West Side" was considered by many commentators to be an area of poverty, corruption, crime and unsavoury types. In reality of course it was a home to thousands of working class people who carved their own lives out of the limited opportunities that they had ... Subtitled, Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914, Joseph J. Varga's new book is a detailed examination of the development of this district in New York, but more importantly, an attempt to understand, using the concept of the "production of space" how that urban space was shaped and, in turn, shaped those who inhabited it.

Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates on "Black America and A New Freedom Budget" in Truthout

February 20, 2024

"A Freedom Budget for All Americans," published in 1966 by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, demanded that the federal government put in place policies and programs that would eliminate poverty within ten years. Its authors demonstrated with clear and realistic assumptions about government taxes and revenues that this could be accomplished easily. The "Freedom Budget" was a direct descendant of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The organizers of the march and the architects of the "Freedom Budget"—people like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.—understood that ending poverty, achieving full employment, guaranteeing incomes, winning higher wages and providing good schools, national health care and decent housing would not happen without tremendous struggle, one that challenged not only the federal government but the basic structure of a capitalist economy. Their sensibility was democratic and socialist; it envisioned a society both egalitarian and controlled by the people themselves