Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century reviewed by Counterfire

Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century

Robert W. McChesney, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press 2014), 272pp.

At the end of the 1980s, the mood among anti-Apartheid activists was gloomy. Many of them considered the situation in South Africa to be as bad as ever, and chances of abolishing the racist system seemed slim. Two years later, Nelson Mandela was a free man, and a couple of years after his release, he was the first president of post-Apartheid South Africa. Robert McChesney tells this episode at the beginning of his latest book to point out a lesson of which we need to remind ourselves every so often: social change is rarely accurately predicted. It is, on the contrary, ‘almost always a surprise, so we have to keep our minds open to the possibility’ (p.16). It is with this refreshing sense of optimism that McChesney starts his collection of essays, which cover a variety of topics over the past fifteen years – from the Nader presidential campaign in 2000 to the Wisconsin uprising, the corruption of American politics, and the prospects for the media-reform movement.

As in his previous books, this latest volume is both informative and readable, and it manages to balance sharp analysis with excursions into the author’s personal experience; his life has been interesting enough to warrant such digressions. Above all, McChesney seeks to convey a sense of hope that radical change is indeed possible – and that we need to be ready for it. ‘Our job is to […] grasp the dynamics, the tensions, and the contradictions. It is to be prepared so that as crisis points emerge or explode onto the scene […] people will be in a position to generate humane and sustainable solutions’ (p.17)…

Read the entire review from Counterfire