At the beginning of 2013, American workers were reeling from body blows — in Michigan among other places. How does that state transmogrify from being the heart of the labor movement to a “right-to-work (for less)” locale, taking its place alongside the Deep South? This anti-worker plague swept through surrounding states. Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, in that order, took away workers’ right to negotiate their conditions, even though this tack was defeated by a vote of the public in Ohio in November 2011. Indiana enacted a right-to-work law affecting private sector employees. A year after the Ohio vote, workers in Michigan were defeated on two referenda concerning government workers’ ability to negotiate. At that stage, what happened in the latter state shouldn’t have shocked anyone. | more…

Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they’re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor’s past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book’s insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform. | more…

A remarkable political biography of two activists who devoted their lives to the struggle for equality in South Africa… Given its wealth of detail, the wide range of interviews that Weider has conducted, and the letters to which he has been granted access, it deserves to remain the definitive biography of First and Slovo for a long time… This timely book should be read by all who seek to understand the remarkable couple and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in depth. | more…

Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, published this year by Monthly Review Press. He was interviewed on Background Briefing with Ian Masters, discussing his recent appearance on Bill Moyers, “zombie politics,” student activism, and more. Background Briefing is broadcast by KPFK in Los Angeles and syndicated around the United States.  | more…

Ronnie Kasrils was a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Minister of Intelligence in the post-apartheid government, and author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, published by Monthly Review Press. He’s interviewed on Democracy Now!, discussing his relationship with Nelson Mandela and how the ANC’s economic views have shifted.  | more…

Give the gift of Monthly Review this holiday season! For the special price of $29, give someone a 1-year subscription to Monthly Review, along with a free book. Choose from An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich, or The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism by Samir Amin.  | more…

Long-time South African educator and President of the New Unity Movement, R. O. Dudley had a quote that he used when speaking of various iconic South African struggle leaders: He “had arms, not wings.” It is a phrase that we should remember when speaking of the late Nelson Mandela, but unfortunately, press coverage in the United States as well as throughout the world has turned Madiba into a Hallmark greeting card figure. And while Mandela’s role as a freedom fighter and the major force for reconciliation in the new democratic South Africa should be honored and celebrated, we must remember that we are talking about a complex revolutionary, and also a complex politician. | more…

Corporate globalization is an international phenomenon by definition that is commonly opposed on nationalist lines. A process embedded in capitalist competition and advanced by the industrialists and financiers who directly benefit from it, however, transcends borders. Understanding corporate globalization is necessary to developing strategies to effectively counter it, and relying on nationalist arguments is a barrier to grasping the systemic nature of globalization, argues Martin Hart-Landsberg in his just released book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance and Alternatives. | more…

Throughout the world, multinational firms, private investors and state corporations are buying agricultural land. Fred Magdoff is the author of the recent article “21st Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession,” published in the November 2013 issue of Monthly Review. He is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He was interviewed on the radio show Mud and Water, broadcast by CKUW in Winnipeg, Canada.  | more…

Please join us for a Holiday Party at the Monthly Review office in New York City, on Wednesday, December 11, 5:30 to 8:30 pm, at 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W, (between 6th and 7th avenues). No rsvp required. | more…

The 2012 release, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, delivers the long-awaited final section of Mészáros’ 1979 study on Sartre’s work. Originally intended to constitute a second volume, the analysis of Sartre’s conception of history now serves to expand and complete the original text. The stated purpose of this new edition is to fill a political lacuna inadequately addressed by postmodernism and post-structuralism, to resurrect from its bourgeois determinations the dignity of the notion of individual responsibility championed by Sartre, to pay the debt owed to Sartre by Marxists. In a time when “the future seems to be fatefully barred by capitalism’s deepening crisis”, a retrieval of the power of radical negation seems necessary so that we can admit with Sartre that “a barred future is still a future.” | more…

What do we know about recent progressive reform in the US? Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have answers for the current moment in A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today. The authors take a critical look at the Freedom Budget of 1966. If this is new to you, read on. The Freedom Budget was “a practical step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty in America during the next 10 years.” Since private business was not up to the task, government spending would bridge the gap.  | more…