February 20, 2024
The Economic War against Cuba by Salim Lamrani was published earlier this year by Monthly Review Press. In his address to the United Nations on the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Cuban Secretary of State Bruno Rodriguez mentions the book as a valuable guide to understanding the blockade.
February 20, 2024
(Michael Lebowitz is the author of The Contradictions of "Real Socialism".) Why did 'real socialism' and, in particular the Soviet Union, fall? Let me note a few explanations that have been offered. With respect to the Soviet Union, one very interesting explanation that has been suggested is that it's all the fault of Mikhail Gorbachev. And not simply the errors of Gorbachev but the treachery. Those who offer this explanation rely in particular upon a document which is sometimes described as his confession.
February 20, 2024
Ruth and Joe, white secular Jews in apartheid South Africa, did not have to fight against that society of skin-color privilege. Yet they did because that social system doomed scores of people to lives of misery and poverty. We discover the complexities of place, space, and time in Ruth and Joe's lives among those with and without name recognition to overthrow white-minority rule in South Africa.
February 20, 2024
Alan Wieder is the author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid, an oral history of the iconic revolutionary couple and their struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He is interviewed by Walter Turner for Africa Today on Berkeley's KPFA, also available to stream online.
February 20, 2024
Socialist intellectuals (e.g., Bayard Rustin) and radical labor leaders (e.g., A. Philip Randolph) were trusted advisers and allies of Martin Luther King Jr. Their social-democratic economic ideas ... embodied in the "Freedom Budget" ... called for the elimination of poverty by 1976 through programs to create full employment, eliminate slums, and ensure a minimum standard of living for all. The book ends with a proposed updated version of the Freedom Budget; the budget includes federal programs for full employment, a restructuring of education and job-training systems, and more. ... Invaluable for restating the influence of the American left on King's views and enriching the historical record.
February 20, 2024
Nancy Stout, author of One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, will be speaking in the Minneapolis area, at the invitation of the Minnesota Cuba Committee. Click here for more information.
![Henry A. Giroux addresses the Ontario Common Front Assembly [VIDEO]](https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/monthlyreview_wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/20123148/pb3447-325x488.jpg)
February 20, 2024
Henry A. Giroux is the author of America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, recently published by Monthly Review Press. This video was recorded on August 19, 2013, at his keynote address to the Third Ontario Common Front General Assembly.
February 20, 2024
A sense of the arguments and perspective that drive Jeb Sprague's detailed study of paramilitarism in Haiti from the early 1990s to 2004 is given in the following quote, which comes in a closing chapter: "As with all historical processes, Haiti's recent history cannot be reduced to pure good versus pure evil—the popular Lavalas movement had its own contradictions and failures. Even so, right-wing paramilitarism and its backers have produced, by far, the most victims of political violence in Haiti in recent history" (p. 281). Sprague supports this point—and at the same time aims to expose layers of political complexity—with an intriguing assessment of the role of paramilitary organizations in ensuring that popular movements in the Caribbean republic are kept hobbled.
February 20, 2024
Unbelievably the family of sciences that should shoulder the burden of enlightening society in the light of the alarming findings of the natural sciences, seems to be struck by a debilitating paralysis, except that the truth is far worse. In The Ecological Rift – Capitalism's War on the Earth (Monthly Review Press, 2010) John Bellamy Foster and his fellow authors draw one's attention to the scandalous complicity, on the part of the social sciences, with the very economic system that is driving ecological ruin. One might wonder why this is the case. In fact, one might expect human scientists to be more radical in their approach to the matter than their natural science colleagues, while the opposite is in fact the case.
February 20, 2024
Alan Wieder is the author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid. Here, he is interviewed by Eric Mann for Voices from the Frontlines Radio, broadcast by Pacifica KPFK 90.7 FM.
