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EXCERPTS: PARAGUAYAN SORROW (Forthcoming!)

Paraguayan Sorrow:
Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land

By Rafael Barrett
Edited by William Costa
240 pages / $26.00 / 978-1-68590-078-6

“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’

Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.

Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…

A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism

EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People)

In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!

ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…

Science and the knowledge economy bolster Cuba’s socialist revolution (The Knowledge Economy and Socialism reviewed by CP-Maine)

A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from biotechnology exports is down. | more…

An ecological civilization will have to be socialist (‘Samauma’ interviews Ian Angus )

A responsible thinker, Angus tackles contradictions and doesn’t resort to facile discourse. “There’s a tendency in some of the degrowth movement (which advocates economic contraction for environmental reasons) to think the real problem is that everyday consumers are all greedy. But telling ordinary workers that they should have less probably isn’t a good start,” he warns. “We have to look at the degrowth issue as a social issue and at things in our societies like advertising and military spending, which produce profit but actually have negative effects on ordinary people’s lives, whether they realize it or not.” | more…

La primera versión en inglés del libro de este gran pensador italiano (Western Marxism reviewed in ‘Canarias Semanal’)

Gabriel Rockhill y Jennifer Ponce de León han escrito la Introducción a la versión inglesa de El Marxismo Occidental, titulada “El socialismo como liberación anti-colonial: lecciones contemporáneas de Losurdo”, en la que no sólo delinean las ideas-fuerza de Losurdo y el método de análisis que aplica en esta obra, sino que también ofrecen interesantes reflexiones sobre la “industria de la teoría” y el “socialismo realmente existente”…. | more…

“Eastern” light on Western Marxism? (Losurdo’s work reviewed by ‘New Left Review’)

Losurdo’s key move is to contrast ‘Western Marxism’ systematically with an ‘Eastern Marxism’, presented as its productive antithesis. The Western variant, Losurdo agrees with other accounts, was born out of a reaction against the slaughter of the First World War, and the magnetism of the revolution in Russia. The outlook of its earliest thinkers—Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin—was, however, from the outset impregnated with a set of themes that went back to the anarchism of Bakunin’s time: notably a hostility to science, associated with capitalism, and to the state of any kind, associated with tyranny. To these it added a messianic streak of eschatological expectation, inherited from a judeo-christian past, that looked forward to salvation for humanity in communism, conceived as the proximate coming of a classless society in which money and the state would disappear. Such utopian hopes vested in a beleaguered USSR were bound to be disappointed…. | more…

Self-inflicted blows (Ron Carey and the Teamsters reviewed for the New York Labor History Association)

As Reiman documents, the union’s reform faction then faced continuing resistance from well entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. In 1996, the still-powerful local officialdom, which backed two competing ​“Old Guard” candidates five years earlier, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge to Carey. It was fronted by a local union lawyer with the most famous last name in Teamsterdom…. | more…

EXCERPTS: LET ME SPEAK! by Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer (MR Classics)

“Domitila’s book serves as an example, a living testimony, of what it means to fight for democracy; that is, democracy not only as the right to vote every five years, but also the right to associate, to think, to organize, and discuss fundamental issues, such as salary, rights, constitutional guarantees, and party politics, in one’s community. This is democracy as a continuous and daily affair, an everyday practice…” -From the Foreword to the Argentine edition | more…

“I Heard a Machine Gun Being Loaded” (Contributer to A Land With a People in ‘The Nation’)

I wasn’t a terrorist—just a journalist, which, in Israel’s eyes, is almost as bad….Everything people learn in journalism school about risk management and safety in the field feels like mere theories on paper in Gaza. Being a journalist during this war means continuing to write your story with one hand on your phone because the second air strike on the targeted residential area scattered metal and glass shrapnel in your arm and destroyed your laptop. It means waiting for the drone to lift higher in the sky so you can escape its surveillance radar and bullets that target every moving object, especially those marked with “PRESS” on their chests… | more…