Value and Crisis opens with a long and highly informative essay on the development of Marxian economics in Japan, and contains a number of the author’s important and original contributions to this stream of thought. Itoh discusses the major points of view on Marx’s theory of value, on theories of crisis, and on problems of Marx’s theory of market value. The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging familiarity with all the major theoretical schools of Marxist thought. In dealing with theories of crisis, for example, Itoh succinctly summarizes and criticizes the points of view of Tugan-Baranovsky, Hilferding, Bauer, Kautsky, Bukharin, and Luxemburg, as well as Grossman, Sweezy, and the Japanese Marxist Kozo Uno, together with the relevant parts of Capital. The book includes a section on the 1930s Great Depression in the context of the theoretical discussion about crisis theory. | more…

The Socialist Register 2014 is the 50th edition of the journal which was founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in 1964 to advance socialist analysis and discussion. It was an offshoot of the New Left, but reflected a different approach from that of the New Left Review editors, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. Over the years, it has produced a rich collection of contributions on socialist ideas. | more…

Alan Wieder has put his oral history expertise together with already existing material on Ruth First and Joe Slovo to construct a remarkable record of these two heroes of South African emancipation. When Nelson Mandela went to Camden Town’s Lyme Street to unveil a blue plaque on the house where they lived in exile from 1966 to 1978, he noted their description as freedom fighters. “This means they were Communists,” he explained to his audience, for some of whom this bluntly positive assessment of a political current that was supposed to be over and done was a little disquieting. | more…

Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress, recently published by Monthly Review Press. He is interviewed by Dr. Jack Rasmus, discussing the strategic implications of the past four decades of partial victories, and numerous defeats, suffered by union labor in America, and what ‘needs to be done’ going forward if unions are to rise again to play the economic and social role in the future they once did in the past. | more…

As 2013 bled into 2014, I read two books that on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. Yet they led me to a startling realisation that made me think perhaps they should be set reading for all South Africans … a ‘history’ that should be recognised as a definitive account of the struggle era and some of its key actors, is the recently published Joe Slovo and Ruth First in the War against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder. | more…

This new book, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, by Paul LeBlanc and Michael Yates looks back at a piece of history from the Civil Rights Revolution that gets little if any mention today. It’s a time worth revisiting as the proposals offered in the Freedom Budget remain unfulfilled. The Freedom Budget for All Americans was issued at a broadly endorsed conference in 1966. It was initiated by civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute with funding from the AFL-CIO. The objective was to keep the momentum after the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. | more…

For fifty years, the Socialist Register has brought together some of the world’s leading radical thinkers to address the most pressing issues of the day. Independent, searching, and erudite analysis is the hallmark of the Socialist Register, and this fiftieth-anniversary issue is no exception. Contributors to Registering Class examine some of our assumptions about class in the light of the global economic crisis and the many forms of resistance it has produced. Furthermore, they address how capitalist classes are reorganizing to respond to the economic turmoil and how the structure and composition of working classes in the twenty-first century are also changing. This volume captures the essence of the Socialist Register project and is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the shifting realities of class and class struggle today. | more…

On 11 February 2011, newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced a Budget Repair Bill in the Wisconsin legislature that sought to balance the state budget by eliminating collective bargaining for all public employees except police and firefighters. Workers in both the public and the private sector were outraged… These events are well known. But contributors to the new essay collection Wisconsin Uprising enrich this story with detailed first-hand accounts, context and analysis from longtime observers of the labour movement, and examples from across the country of how that movement might broaden and deepen the struggle that began anew in Wisconsin. They face the complex task of analyzing a new moment in history from a recent vantage point, and they succeed admirably. | more…

The authors, eminent representatives of the Monthly Review or monopoly capital school, argue that giant corporations, not free or efficient markets, dominate the economy. We live in a perverse world where powerful firms extract high profits but this becomes an economic problem as core national economies suffer from weak final demand, industrial overcapacity, and lack of investment. Foster and McChesney also challenge nationalist perspectives, insisting the economy should be conceived as a global whole. | more…

In comparison to other books and their focus on education reform, Giroux (McMaster Univ., Canada) provides a much more poignant and global perspective on the social and political disenfranchisement of today’s youth and how the social and political impact education (and vice versa). Such issues are honed (almost) exclusively with a concern for youth from impoverished and/or diverse backgrounds, but done so with fairness and well-sustained arguments. Throughout the book, Giroux maintains a methodical approach to the discussion and cites specific and (surprisingly) contemporary examples of skewed social perceptions of youth from diverse backgrounds (e.g., hoodie politics). | more…

Joe Slovo and Ruth First were South Africans who spent their lives (and in Ruth’s case gave her life) in the struggle against apartheid. They were also members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) for most of their adult lives. They married in the late 1940s and despite a stormy relationship remained together until Ruth First was murdered in Mozambique’s capital Maputo in 1982. Their lives are worthy of celebration (and study) and Alan Wieder has written the first thorough account of their lives. The book details the struggle in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and their life in exile in Britain, and across sub-Saharan Africa. Wieder presents the politics of this revolutionary couple with the sympathetic though critical attention they deserve. | more…

Bruce Neuburger dedicated five years to write about his life as a farmworker in the fields of the rich Salinas Valley, California in his new book, Lettuce Wars, which takes readers on a unique voyage written by an activist who worked 10 years as a farmworker between 1970 and 1980… Lettuce Wars is one of the very few well-documented books recently published dealing with the farmworkers’ movement from a different perspective other than the “official story” published by the UFW, giving voice to the many anonymous workers and activists who fought for their dignity and a better life for them and their families.

It should be a mandatory reference for those who want to know more about those turbulent years and the life of farmworkers. | more…

Join Monthly Review Press author, philosopher, and veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs for two special events in New York City: a conversation with Professor Melissa Harris-Perry and other guests at New York University and a screening of the film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs at Barnard College. | more…