Marsh shares his affection for Walt Whitman in this gentle, thoughtful consideration of the poet’s relevance to 21st-century America. Beset by moral malaise in his 30s, the author “suffered from fully-grown doubts, not just growing doubts, about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country.” Whitman’s insights on death, money, sex and democracy buoyed his spirits …. Marsh confesses his love for the legendary poet, and by the end of this insightful homage, readers are likely to feel the same. | more…
Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. | more…
José Carlos Mariátegui, a creative Marxist thinker and activist from Peru, who was born in 1894 and died in 1930, was once not widely known in the English-speaking world. Over the last few decades, however, more and more people have learned about his life and works, and in 2011, MR Press was proud to publish a comprehensive anthology of his writings, edited and translated by the scholars Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker. Now, we’re pleased to present José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology as our November book of the month. Receive 35% off when you use the coupon code BOM1114 at checkout. | more…
Join Gerald Horne, author of Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow, at these upcoming events in Los Angeles, California! Friday, 7 November, 7 PM, a book signing at Eso Won Bookstore, and on Saturday, 8 November, Noon to 3PM, a “Black Brown Unity Event” at the Holman United Methodist Church. | more…
Want political economy that soberly unpacks power and wealth? Read two recent books by Samir Amin who defines the system’s current stage as “generalized-monopoly capitalism.” His study of it reveals what standard economics conceals and distorts. The two books under review study the economy within the parameters of social change. Amin takes a Marxist, historic view of the system’s “grow or die” imperatives in developed and emerging nations. | more…
Foster (Univ. of Oregon) is editor of Monthly Review and one of the leading experts in Marxian political economy. In this new edition, Foster explains that the increasing tendency of monopolistic companies to control a large share of the financial industry since the 1980s has created a “financialization-stagnation trap” that is negatively affecting economies of all countries around the world. | more…
Tully (politics and history, Victoria Univ., Australia) is a committed author with a fine ear for the apt and evocative phrase, whether it be from Bertolt Brecht, Jack London, or Karl Marx. The story he has to tell is that of an unsuccessful strike that took place at London’s massive Silvertown works in the wake of the more famous match girls strike of 1888 and the London dock strike of 1889. | more…
Join Cal Winslow, editor of the new Monthly Review Press title E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, for a book talk in Mendocino, California, on Friday October 17th, 6:30 PM at Gallery Bookshop. | more…
In the opening line of his essay on The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: the Conductor and the Conducted, Alex Cistelecan proposes that my book should be read as ‘an exercise in the moral psychology of “human development”‘; and he proceeds to riff on this theme by speaking of my ‘moral supplement to Marxism’, ‘the moral supplement of human development’, ‘the moral approach to Real Socialism’, and my apparent claim that the classical elements of socialism should be supplemented ‘with a vital third element’—namely, that my ‘revised formula for 21st century socialism’ would be ‘soviets+ electrification+ human kindness’. HA! Not only is this unrecognisable as a description of my book on ‘real socialism’ book but it is precisely contrary to what I have argued in that book and developed in my immediately preceding work, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (2010). | more…
For the past three decades, the world has been subjected to the ideology of “free trade.” Remove all barriers to trade, and a consumerist paradise would be the international result. Or so we were promised. Three decades later this ideology rings hollow; not only have the promised benefits failed to materialize, but those who have benefited have been overwhelmingly the ruling class, “the 1%,” while the rest of us have been forced to face a grimmer reality. Fortunately we have writers such as Martin Hart-Landsberg on our side to examine the actuality of capitalist globalization, as he does in his book by the same name. | more…
It’s no secret that the U.S. labor movement is in distress. To those who care about how to turn that situation around, Steve Early has a message worth reading in his Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. The book describes the problems facing workers—and some possible solutions such as organizing more union members, waging successful strikes, or developing new union leadership at the local or national level The chapters are essays (many have appeared previously in various magazine and labor publications), most of which tell stories of real people and struggles. | more…
Join us Saturday, October 25th to celebrate Cal Winslow and his latest book, E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, in Sausalito, CA. In his early years, Cal studied with the brilliant scholar and activist, E.P. Thompson, author of the acclaimed historical masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was also a political activist and strategist who played a key role in shaping the New Left of the 1960’s. He engaged with workers, unions, political parties, elections and co-founded the New Left Review. Cal’s new book explains the critical role that Thompson played in shaping New Left thinking in Britain, America and around the world – with insights that remain valuable and relevant for political activists today. | more…
Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber edit probing essays in “Registering Class: Socialist Register 2014”. Contributors focus in part on the economics and politics of workers’ fragmentation. Capital’s constant breaking up of the laboring class and its re-composition is a recurring theme throughout. Merchant capital looms large. | more…