Monthly Review Press

Lettuce Wars reviewed in the Huffington Post

February 20, 2024

The author of Lettuce Wars has produced a most compelling work. It will be of particular interest to other former "colonizers" who got active in the labor movement in the 1970s as members of various left-wing groups, including the RCP. Lettuce Wars should be also be read by their younger, union-backed counterparts, who are now "salting" non-union hotels, warehouses, and fast food joints in the pursuit of goals more modest than world revolution.

"Bold New Era or Hard Times for Organized Labor?" Seattle MRP event w/ Steve Early and Arun Gupta

February 20, 2024

Is this a Bold New Era or Hard Times for Organized Labor? Find out at a Monthly Review Press book event and discussion of workers' movements in the U.S. and abroad, on Monday, May 5, 7 P.M., at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle! Meet former CWA organizer Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions, and Arun Gupta, contributor to In These Times and Registering Class, the 2014 edition of Socialist Register. Singers from the Seattle Labor Chorus will perform!

NEW! Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement by Ralf Dose

February 20, 2024

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was one of the first great pioneers of the gay liberation movement. This biography, first published to acclaim in Germany, follows Hirschfeld from his birth in the Prussian province of Pomerania to the heights of his career during the Weimar Republic and the rise of German fascism. Ralf Dose illuminates Hirschfeld's ground-breaking role in the gay liberation movement and explains some of his major theoretical concepts, which continue to influence our understanding of human sexuality and social justice today.

NEW! PolyluxMarx: An Illustrated Workbook for Studying Marx’s Capital

February 20, 2024

by Valeria Bruschi, Antonella Muzzupappa, Sabine Nuss, Anne Stecklner and Ingo Stützle; translated by Alexander Locascio. Reading Capital can be a daunting endeavor and most readers need guidance when tackling this complex work. PolyluxMarx provides such guidance. Developed by scholars and political activists associated with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Foundation), one of the leading political education institutions in Germany, this book has been field tested with groups studying Marx's masterpiece over several years. It consists of a large set of PowerPoint presentations, combined with detailed annotations and suggestions for ways to discuss the material.

A Freedom Budget for All Americans reviewed by International Viewpoint

February 20, 2024

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.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid reviewed in the Daily Maverick

February 20, 2024

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.

Steve Early discusses Save Our Unions on Alternative Visions Radio

February 20, 2024

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.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid reviewed in the Morning Star

February 20, 2024

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.

Registering Class reviewed in The Spokesman

February 20, 2024

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.

Back in Print! Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan by Makoto Itoh

February 20, 2024

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.