The strike was very popular with the American people. Many Americans had their sons and daughters working part-time shifts or their brothers and friends as UPS drivers. They were regular faces on America’s Main Streets, in businesses, diners, and coffee shops… | more…
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: Through May, 2024, MRP is offering free 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…
Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in “Putting Members First,” is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition builder with other reformers. Last, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power, and personal fiefdoms. Read on for some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles…. | more…
The shadows of this history continue to cast a dark cloud over people and the planet. Take the new US Cold War against China and Russia. We see the slow motion train wreck of US economic power in decline and its military drive to dominate the world, directly and by proxy. The unipolar world order is changing, which Sheehan’s autobiography fleshes out in practical and theoretical ways. She is no armchair academic… | more…
““However, it happened that one summer ten distinguished members of my faculty convened (five at a time) and unanimously declared me guilty of ‘deviousness, artfulness, and indirection hardly to be expected of a University colleague.’ I had refused, first before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then before these juries of professors, to answer yes or no to the question, was I a Communist….” | more…
In 1964, reality came crashing into the ‘theoretical discourse’ when the Brazilian bourgeoise funded and supported, with the backing of American imperialism, a coup against the democratically elected government of João Goulart and installed a military dictatorship that lasted two decades. The orthodox analysis of Brazil’s dependency left orthodox communists ill-prepared to offer any sort of resistance. Unfortunately, the view that the road to breaking with dependency by developing capitalism is still predominant in some sections of the left…. | more…
“I was indicted for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer, and the point was to get the Supreme Court to accept the argument in my defense that the hearing was illegal and so nothing I did at it (cogent or not) could be the basis for a finding of guilt. This challenge was known to be a long shot, and sure enough, I lost and served a 6-month sentence in 1960”- Chandler Davis | more…
The release of Bernard D’Mello’s India After Naxalbari could not be better timed. D’Mello’s tour de force is both a history of modern India and its “rotten liberal democracy,” including the left’s challenge to it, and a fine-grained look at India’s Maoist movement. It combines a sharp historical account with critical analysis, along with some original theoretical insights. | more…
Investment risk is borne completely by individual account holders… There are many reasons why retirement savings and investment plans do not provide adequate old age security. If money is lost in a stock market downturn or investments do poorly, say goodbye to a secure retirement. The Wall Street financial services industry skims considerable profits from these accounts. That significantly diminishes payouts…. | more…
The blow by blow accounts in this book make fascinating reading, I was particularly impressed by the discussion of the Cigar Workers’ Parliament. It provided the cigar workers an opportunity to raise grievances about the management of the factory, to condemn the thefts of raw materials and to propose solutions to the country’s economic woes. Pedro Ross was able to use his direct contact with Fidel Castro to resolve some of the problems with inefficiency and corruption. | more…
“Her perspective as an anti-racial capitalism activist and writer gives her a comprehensive, dare I say a dialectical, analysis of domestic and foreign policies. The bombs that Uncle Sam dropped on the people of Vietnam also exploded on Americans living in urban and rural communities experiencing poverty, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to understand in no small part because of Braden’s advocacy.” -Seth Sandronsky | more…
March 26th, live and in person at The People’s Forum, Michael Heinrich joins us to present his biography-in-progress of Karl Marx, which gained glowing reviews from Marxist scholars the world over. | more…
Reading Ross’s account one is struck by the dichotomy between the popular demonology of Cuba as a totalitarian dictatorship in U.S. political discourse, and the radically democratic functioning of the workers’ parliaments. | more…