February 20, 2024
Radical economist and Monthly Review associate editor Michael Yates grew up in a western Pennsylvania manufacturing town. He spent more than three decades working as a college professor. Yet, despite his own academic career, Yates never lost touch with the life experience of high school classmates, friends, neighbors, and relatives who toiled in blue collar jobs...
February 20, 2024
Educational Justice offers hope that there’s still time to take on corporatized schools and build democratic alternatives. Forcefully written by educator and journalist Howard Ryan, with contributing authors, the book deconstructs the corporate assault on schools, assesses the prevailing teachers union responses, and documents best teaching and organizing practices. Reports from various educational fronts include innovative union strategies against charter school expansion, as well as teaching visions drawn from the social justice and whole language traditions. Bold, informative, clearly reasoned, this book is an education in itself—a democratic one at that.
February 20, 2024
Utterly corrupt corporate and government elites bankrupted Greece twice over by profligate deficit spending and by agreeing to an IMF “bailout” of the Greek economy, devastating Greek citizen. Finally, in response to “austerity” measures, the people of Greece stood up, electing, from their own historic roots of resistance, Syriza—the Coalition of the Radical Left. ¶ A seasoned activist and participant-observer, Helena Sheehan adroitly places us at the center of the whirlwind beginnings of Syriza, its jubilant victory at the polls, and finally at Syriza’s surrender to the very austerity measures it once vowed to annihilate. The Syriza Wave is a page-turning blend of political reportage, personal reflection, and astute analysis.
February 20, 2024
Alan Weider has written a biography of Studs Terkel, but in keeping with the man himself, it is not a study of a lone individual, but of the environment and society in which he lived and acted. Studs was what is termed in the US a third-party guy, neither a Democrat nor Republican supporter, an important stand given the current debacle in the US with the election of Trump after Clinton’s lacklustre campaign. He supported all the main third-party candidates from Henry Wallace in 1948 running on a ticket advocating universal healthcare and an end to segregation, to Ralph Nader in his various campaigns.
February 20, 2024
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February 20, 2024
At this writing we Americans find ourselves at the ass end of 2016 after a slog of an election year in which we elected a bankrupted reality TV star as the president elect… The people of the United States have spoken and they do not want progressive, liberal ideas at this time. ¶ For the rest of us, Studs Terkel—the great oral historian, champion of the common man, political activist, radio host, and listener—couldn’t be more relevant now. Author Alan Wieder recently released a timely and engaging biography, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation. Mr. Wieder and I engaged in some conversation about Terkel’s life and work.
February 20, 2024
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, again. In the autumn of 2016, several cases of avian influenza H5N8 were detected across Europe. Some cases were dead wild birds, others were domestic birds. Several farms had to execute culls in the ten thousands…. A few days earlier, the US president Barack Obama visited Germany for the last time during his presidency. During his visit, in a joint paper with German chancellor Angela Merkel, he analysed the importance of transatlantic relations. One line stood out and was repeated throughout media headlines: ‘we will never return to a pre-globalization economy’. So what has that to do with dead birds? ¶ Everything–if you dare to read Rob Wallace’s new book.
February 20, 2024
Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. Change needs to be understood in relation to the distinct trajectories of radical politics in different regions. But the main purpose of this Socialist Register edition—one century after “Red October”—is to look forward, to what might happen next.
February 20, 2024
In 2017, Monthly Review Press will publish the second, updated edition of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers by David L. Wilson and Jane Guskin. Here, for Jacobin, David L. Wilson writes about Trump’s possible use of mass deportation to drive a wedge between workers:
“Like so much about the incoming administration, president-elect Donald Trump’s intentions for undocumented immigrants remain unclear. But he seems likely to go forward with a substantial program of ‘getting them out of our country.’..."
February 20, 2024
As evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin put it in 1992: ‘Asbestos and cotton lint fibres are not the causes of cancer. They are the agent of social causes, of social formations that determine the nature of our productive and consumption lives, and in the end, it is only through changes in those social forces that we can get to the root problem of health’. Why would it be different for emerging infectious diseases? Was the west Africa Ebola epidemic caused by Ebola virus or by the dismantling of public health infrastructure in the countries where it emerged, following years of structural adjustment? What’s the agent? What’s the cause?
