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…
Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by C. J. Polychroniou, who writes for Eleftherotypia in Greece. “What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive.” | more…
Veteran labor journalist and rank-and-file union activist, Steve Early, brings over 40 years of experience and insights to his new collection of essays, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. Early’s collection of short articles provides us with snapshots of the challenges that face workers in today’s era of growing employer hostility and governmental indifference. | more…
Celia Sánchez was Fidel Castro’s right-hand woman. She was the daughter of a country doctor, something of a radical himself, a single woman dutifully devoted to looking after daddy and doing good works with a Catholic organisation. It was a superb cover for her underground work. She was in on the Cuban Revolution from the very beginning. Her handler was a remarkable young man, Frank País (later murdered by Batista’s goons) who deserves to be as iconic as ‘Che’ Guevara. (But then so do many others, brave young women and men who were killed in the early days – because of the Cuban Revolution’s success and survival they tend to be forgotten). | more…
Dear Friend of Monthly Review: In the past few years world conditions have changed far more than most people realize. Since the financial collapse of 2007–2008, capitalism has entered a period of pronounced stagnation. The dismal recovery of the past six years is no longer to be regarded as a temporary adjustment; it is the new normal. What this means for the great mass of people in the United States and the globe is also clear: increasing poverty and unemployment; gaping increases in inequality; tremendous downward pressure on wages and benefits; collapsing infrastructure and decline in public services; systematic political corruption; environmental degradation in the pursuit of profit; and endless militarism. Capitalism is a system that gives every sign of being on its last legs. It is eating the future to stay alive today. | more…
Join us for a discussion of workers’ movements in the U.S. and abroad with Steve Early and Manny Ness on Wednesday, June 4, 6:30 to 8 P.M. at the NWU/UAW Hall in New York City. Former CWA organizer Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress and Manny Ness, professor of political science at Brooklyn College/CUNY is the editor of New Forms of Worker Organization. | more…
Join Monthly Review and many others from around the world at this year’s Left Forum conference at John Jay College, the City University of New York, May 30 to June 1. Left Forum is the largest annual gathering of left activists and scholars in the United States. This year’s theme is “Reform and/or Revolution: Imagine a World of Transformative Justice.” Please click here for more information on MR-sponsored and related panels, and don’t forget to visit the Monthly Review Press table for discounts on a wide range of MR Press titles, new and old! | more…
Long overdue in the catalog of books on the Cuban Revolution, Nancy Stout’s One Day in December has made an important contribution to the study of the guerrilla insurrection and Fidel’s Cuba by presenting Celia Sánchez Manduley as one of the Revolution’s key players. Stout sheds light on and pays well deserved homage to this valiant and fiercely strong-minded Cuban female revolutionary, who remains hardly known outside of Cuba. | more…
Alan Wieder has done a wonderful service in researching and writing such a detailed, well constructed narrative, setting the intertwined personal histories in the context of the long and difficult struggle against apartheid. Based on extensive reading of relevant literature, much enriched by interviews, as befits an oral historian, this book provides many new insights to those of us who only knew a part of the lives of Ruth First and Joe Slovo. | more…
John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of the theoretical perspective that continues in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. | more…
Join Johanna Brenner, author of Women and the Politics of Class; Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions; and Arun Gupta, contributor to Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, for a discussion of “Organizing and Winning for Twenty-First Century Movements” on Wednesday, May 7, 2014, 7:15pm-9:30pm, Portland State University, Smith 238, Portland Oregon. | more…