[Britannica’s revisionist] distortions of the history of the Vietnamese struggle are just as radical and just as misleading [as those about the Soviet Union]. Here we may draw some valuable lessons about the hidden content of form: how apparently neutral principles of organization may shape meaning. | more…
At the turn of the century, millions of European women set sail with their families for the United States. Behind them stood a world of peasant agriculture and small town life. Ahead lay the concrete metropolis, swept by the winds of industrial development. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars tells the story of the Jewish and Italian women who came to inhabit New York’s Lower East Side during this period of massive migration. By looking at two generations — mothers born in the Old World, and daughters born in the new — and making extensive use of oral histories, Elizabeth Ewen presents the compelling tale of a metamorphosis in life and in perception. | more…
When Bernardo Vega arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1916, he was at the forefront of a migrant stream that was soon to become a flood. His memoirs—perceptive, lively, and politically aware—provide us with a unique and often humorous firsthand account of the life of an immigrant, as well as of the concerns and activities of the Puerto Rican community in New York in the period between the wars. | more…
The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were co-opted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. | more…
Classic study of the fiscal crisis that gripped New York City — and much of urban America — in the 1970s. | more…
Protest and Survive is a powerful gift to the growing American movement from European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which E.P. Thompson helped to found, drafting the mobilizing documents. The book originated as a reaction to “Protect and Survive,” a take-cover pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The volume contains historian E.P. Thompson’s “A Letter to America,” and 11 other essays exploring the arms race, nuclear war, military bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking. | more…
This book makes the argument, supported by rich and extensive historical research into original sources, that it is possible to revolutionize work so that it can be, in the author’s words, “satisfying, creative, and stimulating at the same time that it is materially productive: we can have material abundance along with interesting work.” | more…
This is the third book of essays on the United States and the world economy produced by the fruitful collaboration of Monthly Review editors Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. In these essays, written between 1977 and 1981, the authors assess the results of efforts taken to stabilize the economy after the epochal changes of the early 1970s, the end of capitalism’s “golden age,” by attempts to counteract the effects of inflation, debt dependence, speculation, and financial instability. | more…
This is the second in the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, set out as it took place the development of U.S. and global capitalism from the late 1960s to the “financial explosion” age of the early 1990s and after. | more…
This is the first of the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, chronicled, as it was taking place, the development of U.S. and global capitalism from the end of its “golden age” in the late 1960s to the full onset of the financial explosion of the early 1990s and after. | more…
This landmark text by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy is a classic of twentieth-century radical thought, a hugely influential book that continues to shape our understanding of modern capitalism. “This book… deals with a vital area of economics, has a unique approach, is stimulating and well written. It represents the first serious attempt to extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism.” — Howard J. Sherman, American Economic Review | more…
“The Drama of America” is truly to be found between the covers of this classic book—an exhilarating and often tragic account of a nation and the struggles of those caught up in the processes of its becoming, written by Monthly Review founding co-editor Leo Huberman. A precursor to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and, like that book, immensely popular upon its release, We, the People recasts U.S. history from the perspectives of those far removed from official power: the anonymous toilers so often ignored by conventional histories. These are the men, women, and children who cleared the land and worked its fields, built and inhabited the factories, moved goods along the railways and canals and highways, and raised the next generation of workers whose exploited labor would propel the nation’s development. | more…