February 20, 2024
Join Bruce Neuburger, author of Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California, just published by Monthly Review Press, for a book talk at the Sacramento Marxist School on Thursday April 18, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM, in Sacramento, CA.
February 20, 2024
Michael A. Lebowitz explores what did (not) happen in the former Soviet Union and central and eastern European nations during the three decades ended in the 1980s. Why write this book? In the 21st century, such recent history matters. Proof of that is the instability, ecologically and economically, that global humanity faces after the fall of Soviet-style communism. To this end, the author focuses on the daily realities and underlying structures of Real Socialism (RS).
February 20, 2024
In his book, Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Jeb Sprague focuses on the last two coups against a democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Sprague demonstrates point-by-point how that violence mostly benefits the few who sponsor it. Even when recognizing potential critics' accusation of bias against this document for ideological bias, the facts recounted by Jeb are irrefutable.
February 20, 2024
It is impossible to fully understand Cuba today without also understanding the economic sanctions levied against it by the United States. In this concise and sober account, Salim Lamrani explains everything you need to know about U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba: their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international law, and how they affect the lives of Cubans. He examines the U.S. government's own official documents to expose what is hiding in plain sight: an indefensible, vicious, and wasteful blockade that has been roundly condemned by citizens around the world.
February 20, 2024
Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was one of the few Polish economists who consistently criticized Poland's transformation to a market economy for failing to satisfy the material and social needs of the majority of the population. From Solidarity to Sellout presents a compilation of Kowalik's writings on the subject over the past twenty years. As one of the leading intellectuals who supported the Polish working-class movement since the '70s (especially during the Solidarity period), the author has an extensive knowledge of both the economic debate and the political meandering that took place in Poland after 1989.
February 20, 2024
Few figures rival Ronnie Kasrils in personifying South Africa's revolutionary trajectory from the day the armed struggle was launched in 1961 through to the messy, post-Apartheid present. Almost twenty years ago, no less a figure than Rusty Bernstein declared of Kasrils and the African National Congress's armed wing, "You can cover the whole history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the life and adult adventures of Ronnie Kasrils." This year, activist scholar Patrick Bond noted that Kasrils is Africa's "highest-profile white revolutionary."...The Unlikely Secret Agent – his biography of his late wife, Eleanor – suggests however that Kasrils' achievements are woven into his relationships. Even a cursory reading of this book provides often surprising insights into the material, political and emotional resources that South African revolutionaries drew on to resist the burgeoning Apartheid state of the 1960s.
February 20, 2024
For much of the 20th century, there was a curious mirror effect between orthodox Soviet and Chicago School ideologies — both saw the other as the only other possible economic system. Although both time and the ongoing global crisis of capitalism has begun to chip away at such a ridiculous binary, to a maddening degree this ideological straitjacket continues to assert itself. A straitjacket that does not spontaneously materialize but is crafted for the maintenance of power.
February 20, 2024
I can't recall if Walter came before or after the demonstrations, but he certainly participated in the discussion that followed after the 1966 expulsion and after the Arusha Declaration. After the Declaration, in '67, '68, there was a small group of people called the Socialist Club in which Malawians, Ugandans, Ethiopians, and many other students were involved. The Socialist Club was transformed into the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). It was all the initiative of students, not the faculty. Walter was one of the few young faculty involved, but purely within a relationship of equality. There was no professor and student there.
February 20, 2024
I am writing this in Córdoba, Andalusia. Outside the Mezquita, alongside Burger King, are the ubiquitous tourist shops with Che Guevara T-shirts inevitably on sale. A question that has long preoccupied me struck me again. What does this T-shirt mean? Jon Lee Anderson (1997) suggests that the image of Che Guevara often symbolises youthful rebelliousness, jettisoned at adulthood along with piercings and dyed hair. Does it mean anything other than an alternative to a flamenco sombrero, a figurine of a bull, or an 'I Love Spain' T-shirt?
February 20, 2024
István Mészáros' newly expanded critical study of Jean-Paul Sartre not only makes a powerful case that Sartre was one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, but also underlines his continuing importance as a thinker whose lifework is 'manifestly representative of our time' (p.141). In demonstrating Sartre's strengths and integrity, Mészáros also reveals how his very failures are sources of illumination. Some of Sartre's most ambitious works remained unfinished, and the reason lies in the contradictions at the core of the philosopher's thinking, and also, as Mészáros points out, at the heart of late capitalist society.
