Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a renowned union leader, feminist, and revolutionary from Bolivia, died on March 13 at age 74. Monthly Review Press is proud to have published her classic memoir, Let Me Speak!, co-authored with Moema Viezzer. The book is a gripping account of her early life in a Bolivian mining town, her subsequent radicalization, and her efforts to organize miners and their wives in the struggle against exploitation and against U.S.-backed dictatorships. Available for a discount of 40% off until the end of April. | more…

Join Jeb Sprague, author of the forthcoming book Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, for a teach-in with Selma James, Danny Glover, and others, at the Southern California Library in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 24. | more…

A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world. | more…

Listen to Michael Yates, editor of Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, discuss the new book and the lessons we can draw from Wisconsin on KPFA’s Against the Grain. | more…

Steve Early, author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, contributor to Wisconsin Uprising, and author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (from Haymarket Books), will be speaking at the following events. | more…

The central aspect of Mészáros’ argument is the impossibility of understanding structure except through history. Furthermore, the denial of history (which is more or less explicit in structuralism and its progeny) is the necessary result of a failure to understand the dialectic of structure and history. Associated with this problem are a whole range of issues, first of all of course, the use of the Marxist concept of base and superstructure. There are also such matters as the relationship between individual and society, as exemplified, in a problematic sense, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempts to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. While both Sartre’s and Lévi-Strauss’ work is seen ultimately in terms of failure, Sartre is regarded with considerable respect. In contrast, Mészáros has little patience with Lévi-Strauss, for whom history in itself was a problem. | more…

Wisconsin Uprising, published by Monthly Review Press, has just done what was needed, which was publishing a book for the people’s movement. In honor of Wisconsin Uprising, here is a free download of “Oh Union,” which is a tribute to our greatest defense against corruption, the Union. Inspired in part by recent events in Wisconsin, the song describes the world without Unions. | more…

In Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now (Monthly Review, paperback, 2010), James D. Cockcroft provides a window to the past and present of the US neighbor. A speaker of English and Spanish, Cockcroft is also a prolific author of books on Mexico, with over a half-century of experience and study there. His new book published a century after the Mexican Revolution arrives at a crucial time, as pundits and politicians “talk loud and say nothing” about the struggles of common people in Mexico. | more…

Join Marc Becker, co-editor of José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (with Harry E. Vanden), for a book party at the Brecht Forum in NYC on March 1, 2012. | more…

It has been almost 10 years since the death of the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould at the relatively early age of 60. Gould was not only a major figure in the life sciences, he was also one of the great popularizers of science. He wrote a monthly column for Natural History magazine from 1974 to 2001, generating exactly 300 essays that explained complex scientific ideas without oversimplifying them. Ten collections of Gould’s popular articles, together with several other books aimed at a general audience, were best sellers, making him one of the best-known scientists of his generation. A year before his death, he was named a “living legend” by the U.S. Library of Congress. What makes Gould of particular interest to readers of this journal is that his scientific views were informed in interesting ways by his radical politics. | more…

I just had the pleasure of reading an important new book entitled, Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia. This book, which was ten years in the making, is written by Oliver Villar & Drew Cottle and published and published by Monthly Review. The premise of the book is that, despite the U.S. claims that it is engaged in a war against drugs in Colombia, it is in fact engaged in an anti-insurgency war against the left-wing FARC guerillas – a war which does not seek to eradicate coca growing and cocaine production in Colombia at all. | more…