This comprehensive study on paramilitarism throughout Haiti’s history focuses particularly on the most recent wave of paramilitaries in the twenty-first century, concerning which it provides a fascinatingly detailed case study. Such groups of armed individuals, serving as irregular forces, in league with brutal militaries or as security militias have had no legitimate or legal status in Haiti – but have had, from the outset, enormous influence in shaping its history. As Sprague shows, throughout Latin America, both local elites and foreign governments have used such groups against the people to advance their own interests. But in Haiti, dictatorial regimes such as the Duvalierist dynasty took this to a new extreme. It is a legacy the country has suffered from ever since. | more…

In the decades since the 1968 death of Martin Luther King, and especially since the 1983 establishment of a national holiday bearing his name, his ideas and goals and those of the movement he helped lead have been sanitized to make them non-threatening to the powers that be. King’s life, work and goals, and those goals of the millions of people who struggled alongside him, have been reduced to four words from one speech: “I have a dream.” But King and other leaders and participants of the civil rights movement of the 1960s had goals that went well beyond overturning the system of Jim Crow segregation in the South and regaining voting rights and full citizenship rights for African Americans. They wanted to transform America to bring economic justice to not only black people but to all working class and poor people. | more…

Join MR Press author Gerald Horne for a discussion of his new book, Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow on Saturday, July 26, 6:30PM, at Sistas’ Place, 456 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. | more…

According to Arts.Mic, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid by Alan Wieder is one of “11 Books You Should Read Before Traveling to South Africa.” The book includes a foreword by Nadine Gordimer and was published by MR Press last year. | more…

The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. | more…

Gerald Horne is the author of Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow, new from Monthly Review Press. He was interviewed on Democracy Now! discussing this and another new book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. | more…

Join Gerald Horne for the launch of his new book, Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow, from Monthly Review Press. Friday, July 25 at 7 pm, New Haven Peoples Center, 37 Howe Street, New Haven, Connecticut. | more…

Ernesto Screpanti is a professor at the University of Siena, Italy, where he teaches on the Economics of Globalization and the Theory of Justice. He is considered a leading theorist in the ‘rethinking Marxism’ research program. His recent publications include The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism (Routledge 2001), Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels, and the Political Economy of Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), and Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis: The Uncertain Future of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press 2014). This interview, originally published in Chinese Social Science Today (n. 597, May 19, 2014), tries to briefly bring to light some of the most innovative of Screpanti’s views on Capitalism. | more…

Few works occupy such an important place in the Monthly Review Press catalog as Hal Draper’s magisterial, five-volume series Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Volume I, which examines Marx’s attitude toward democracy, the state, intellectuals as revolutionaries, and much, much more, was first published to great acclaim in 1977. We’re pleased to offer Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol I: State and Bureaucracy as our June Book of the Month. Use the coupon code DRAPER14 for a 35% discount at checkout. | more…

Is there a Cuban racial problem? This charged question opens up one of the essays in Esteban Morales Domínguez’s book Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality (p. 87). The author is a noted scholar and one of the most prominent black advocates for racial equality in Cuba today. His short answer to the question is a categorical “yes,” an unusual position that he expounds in 11 short essays and 3 interviews collected in this book. | more…

From Sarah Slichter at Teaching for Change: “Steve Early, a long-time labor journalist and union activist, gave a rousing talk at the Teaching for Change Bookstore at Busboys and Poets on June 2. In attendance were over fifty activists, unionists, labor movement veterans as well as those who identified themselves as the ‘youth wing of the labor movement.’” | more…

In this provocative study, economist Ernesto Screpanti argues that imperialism—far from disappearing or mutating into a benign “globalization”—has in fact entered a new phase, which he terms “global imperialism.” This is a phase defined by multinational firms cut loose from the nation-state framework and free to chase profits over the entire surface of the globe. No longer dependent on nation-states for building a political consensus that accommodates capital accumulation, these firms seek to bend governments to their will and destroy barriers to the free movement of capital. And while military force continues to play an important role in imperial strategy, it is the discipline of the global market that keeps workers in check by pitting them against each other no matter what their national origin. | more…

Steve Early is the author of Save our Unions, published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Mike Elk for Working In These Times, who writes: “At time when the labor beat was disappearing from mainstream publications, Early’s writing formed a valuable body of work that inspired many young writers—myself included—to stick with the profession through its highs and lows.” | more…