The World Turned Upside Down? poses overarching questions for the new period opened by the Trump election and the continued growth of right-wing nationalisms. These questions are addressed through a series of essays that carefully map the national, class, racial, and gender dimensions of the state, capitalism, and progressive forces today. Sober assessment is crucial for the left to gain its political bearings in this trying period and the uncertainties that lie ahead. | more…
If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the problems facing working people on seemingly every front, economist and labor educator Michael Yates has written a timely book. In Can the Working Class Change the World? he makes the case that the working class — and only the working class — can indeed overcome economic inequality, eliminate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and meet the challenge of environmental degradation and climate change…. | more…
Preparation and militancy, though essential, don’t guarantee success. In Oklahoma and Kentucky, union leaders cut a poor settlement to end the dispute over the heads of those teachers who took action. Gains in one school, or in a city, or even across a state, can only be provisional absent wider changes in the political field. Hence the need for a vision of society which will consolidate and build from such gains, as Howard Ryan articulates… | more…
Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism… | more…
In a recent appearance on Nick Ferrari’s LBS show, Jacob Rees-Mogg defended the UK’s colonial past, saying that it was ‘not wholly a bad thing’ with ‘bad bits’ and ‘good bits’ such as Britain’s role in ending the slave trade which he describes as ‘really wonderful’. He has this Great White Man view of history, talking of noble ‘heroes’ such as General Gordon at Khartoum, as well as ‘rogues’. It is this sort of history that Gerald Horne eviscerates in this scholarly, brutal and powerful book…. | more…
Jeb Sprague, lecturer on sociology at the University of Virginia and author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, talks to Sara Montes de Oca of RT News about recent crackdowns on protesters demanding the ouster of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse | more…
When the time came to say our goodbyes and lal salaams (red salutes), I told the aged man that he should not have taken all this effort to come so far with us. He replied: ‘You have come all the way from Kolkata to learn about us, our struggles, our concerns. You care about us… | more…
Howard Waitzkin, author, with the Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism, of Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health, will be on hand at two gatherings in California’s Bay Area to talk about his book… | more…
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Named for the historian Isaac Deutscher and his wife Tamara, this prize is awarded each year for a book demonstrating “the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” Previous prize winners include Mike Davis, Robin Blackburn, Ellen Mieksins Wood, Eric Hobsbawm, and Monthly Review Press authors Michael A. Lebowitz, Tamás Krausz, Lucio Colleti, and István Mészáros. | more…
There are too few contemporary histories of the Naxalite movement. This book, which includes revolutionary song and poetry, is a substantial contribution…. | more…
Howard Waitzkin, author — along with the Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism — of “Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health,” will speak on the U.S. health-care system, and how it could rescued and made an integral part of a new and radically different society. | more…
If the working class doesn’t save our vastly unequal and dying world, it’s difficult to see who will. Certainly not the billionaire class, which has the money to put the brakes on climate change by investing in renewables but has not yet seemed inclined to do so. They don’t seem particularly interested in eliminating inequality either. As for the better-off middle classes, they ‘are more likely to support fascism than profound social change,’ according to Michael Yates in his new book. So that leaves the working class…. | more…