Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a long-time contributor to and friend of Monthly Review, will be discussing her new book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States at Bluestockings Books in New York City, on Thursday, September 25, 7pm. | more…
Labor law is outdated and rotten in the US, corporations have an inordinate amount of power, so it is rare that unions win or even strike these days. Solid activist leadership in our unions is rare in these last decades of concessionary bargaining and the sustained war on the working class. The lack of a class perspective by many Americans makes them susceptible to the ugliest sorts of manipulation against their own interests. Steve Early has seen much of it and described it in a clear-eyed fashion in his latest book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review 2013). It should be read by unionists and their supporters and the more than 60% of Americans who pollsters say would like to be unionized. | more…
This is a long overdue account of an important struggle in London’s East End in 1889 with many parallels and lessons for workers today. It was part of a wider upsurge of workers’ struggles that led to a rebirth of the trade union movement, and to the creation of independent working-class political representation in the form of the Labour Party. John Tully explains why this strike has largely been lost in the annals of the labour movement – unlike the famous Bryant & May matchgirls’ strike of 1888 and the London dock strike which was still on as the Silvertown strike started. | more…
MR Press author John Tully discusses his book Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement in this interview on “Nights,” a program broadcast by Radio New Zealand. | more…
Join two MR Press authors, Gerald Horne and Steve Early, at the third annual LaborFest Hawaii, on Friday, September 19th, 2014, 6:00 p.m., at Mark’s Garage in Honolulu, HI. Gerald Horne is the author of Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii and Race to Revolution; Steve Early is author of Save Our Unions. | more…
Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress, published by Monthly Review Press, is interviewed by Cindy Sheehan for her radio show “Cindy Sheehan’s Soap Box.” | more…
Don’t let the title scare you. John Bellamy Foster’s The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (Monthly Review Press) is a good read and resource for making sense of the world around us. Foster edits the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, launched in 1949 with an Albert Einstein essay, and he is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. For the past three decades, Foster has been breaking new ground in writing on the ecology, economy and polity in the pages of MR and MR Press. | more…
On August 15, 2014, Marta Harnecker accepted the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought, awarded for her book, A World to Build: New Paths towards Twenty-first Century Socialism (forthcoming from Monthly Review Press). Available here are her remarks, translated by Federico Fuentes and originally published by Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal. | more…
John Tully writes in the Preface to his new book, Silvertown – The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labour Movement, (Monthly Review Press, 2014), that ‘Conservatives have attacked some of my previous work as being partisan, and this book should upset them again.’ Radical historians, however, will welcome it for precisely that reason. And treasure it, because this is a way of writing labour history – or any history – that academic historians usually run a mile from. Radical historians know that it is impossible to be non-partisan. As Tully explains, ‘Historians must always be scrupulous with the facts, but we should be deeply suspicious of claims that studies of human society can be “value free”.’ | more…
Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of actually existing socialism, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted should be read more as an exercise in the moral psychology of ‘human development’ that, for Michael Lebowitz, should supplement today’s Marxism. The crucial tenet of this kind of socialism is the idea, nay, the ideal of human development. According to the author, the main problem with the old theory and practice of Marxism is that it hosts ‘a distortion that forgot about human beings’. | more…
The Africans were apprehensive—with good reason. It was early in 1862 and the nation in which they resided, the United States, was embroiled in a bloody civil war. As such, the Washington authorities sought to send hundreds of them to Key West to work on fortifications, as this small town was well behind the lines of the so-called Confederate States of America—which dominated most of Florida—and had sought secession precisely on the grounds of continuation of enslavement of Africans. But the Africans asked to take on this important task balked, assuming this might be a prelude to selling them into slavery in Cuba, just across the Florida Straits. Their nervousness was understandable, since, for the longest period, there had been a robust slave trade—licit and otherwise—between the republic and the Spanish colony. | more…
On July 27, Gerald Horne, a radical scholar whose historical work refocuses our attention on the structures and legacies of white supremacy and black resistance, presented his two most recent books, Race to Revolution (published by Monthly Review Press) and The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (published by New York University Press) at Red Emma’s in Baltimore. The event was recorded and video is kindly provided by our friends at Red Emma’s. | more…
The author and critic Walter Benjamin once wrote in an essay titled “On the Concept of History”: “There has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” John Tully’s new book Silvertown is a well-researched examination of that very duality–with London, the 19th century heart of bourgeois imperial culture, at its center. | more…