Category: Monthly Review Press /

A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution reviewed in Counterfire

February 20, 2024

Cushion is able to make a substantial case that the working-class contribution to the revolution has been severely underestimated, and that in fact Castro’s guerrilla movement would not have been able to take power without working-class militancy. The story is detailed and intricate, but full of interest, beginning with the defeat of the 1933 general strike, which first brought Batista to political leadership in Cuba, but concentrating on the years of the latter’s dictatorship proper, from March 1952, to the consolidation of Castro’s government in 1959

Henry Giroux: “Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age”

February 20, 2024

Monthly Review Press author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, Henry A. Giroux writes frequently for Truthout.org “This week, Donald Trump lowered... READ MORE

E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left reviewed in New Politics

February 20, 2024

E.P. Thompson (1924–1993) wore several hats during his life. His magnum opus as a historian was The Making of the English Working Class, one of the greatest history books written in the twentieth century in any language. He fought tirelessly for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, which almost surely took years off his life. He may well be least remembered for being a founder of the British New Left. For this reason, Cal Winslow’s selection of Thompson’s writings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s is especially welcome and timely—though not surprising, since Winslow was a student of Thompson’s at the University of Warwick and is a longtime activist and writer.

Leo Panitch via KPFA on Hillary, Donald, and the Future of American Politics

February 20, 2024

Leo Panitch, distinguish professor at York University, Canada, is the author of several books and the editor, with Greg Albo, of The Socialist Register, an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the international independent new left.

“Ideas for the Struggle”: 12 essays by Marta Harnecker

February 20, 2024

Marta Harnecker, author of over eighty books and monographs in several languages, including A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, wrote 12 articles on political activism and revolutionary vision, published in Venezuela in 2004. These articles were revised and updated this year, and now appear, translated by Federico Fuentes, on the Old and New Project website, with an introduction by the editors

The Politics of the Right reviewed in Race & Class

February 20, 2024

When it was made, Socialist Register’s decision to devote its 2016 issue to the far Right was prescient; when published late last year it was more than timely. Now, both it and this review are in danger of being overtaken by the phenom- enon they’re describing. If the far Right was on the march in 2015, its progress is even more alarmingly visible now.