February 20, 2024
U.S. capitalism has a hate-love relationship with the nation’s schools. On the ‘hate’ side is a stream of complaints from business leaders and organizations about the many students, particularly in city schools, who fail grade-level achievement tests, are high school dropouts or, if they complete high school, do not have the academic qualifications for college and advanced-skills education....
February 20, 2024
Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better....
February 20, 2024
Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
144 pp, $23 pbk, ISBN 9781583676011
By Samir Amin
Reviewed by Mat Callahan in Socialism and Democracy, vol. 32, no. 1, pp 174-77
February 20, 2024
This is a terrific book. It deserves to be read carefully by both scholars and activists. In seven well-written chapters, James Young explores the emergence, struggles, victories and setbacks of a radical, democratic union, one that confronted powerful adversaries in the business, labor, and faith-based communities throughout the mid and late twentieth century.
February 20, 2024
In the 1990s, high tech firms and their mainstream media boosters proclaimed that the Internet and digital technology would unleash a new era that would destroy monopolies, liberate democratic impulses, and usher in what Bill Gates called “frictionless capitalism.” From the first, Monthly Review’s assessment was different. We foresaw instead the ways that the communications revolution would generate monopoly power on a scale never seen before.
February 20, 2024
David L. Wilson, with Jane Guskin, is the author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (2nd Edition). In his latest article for Truthout, Wilson asks, “Is there really any reason for the US government to deport non-citizens with criminal records?”
February 20, 2024
Just out! Gerald Coles’s Miseducating for the Global Economy provides a real education about the twenty-first-century global economy—and what corporations are doing to prevent our learning about it.
February 20, 2024
The United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America—the unwieldy name is usually shortened to United Electrical Workers, or UE—occupies a significant niche in the history of the American labor movement....
February 20, 2024
These days we see a seemingly odd project taking place in the realms of American liberalism: ferocious insistence that the truly outrageous Donald J. Trump is at his worst when….making peace with our enemies! Has he been brainwashed by Russian and/or North Korean agents, perhaps? Or is this all, perhaps, a crude plan to place Trump Steaks in Trump hotels in heretofore unbidden locations? What kind of madness would lessen the threat of American nukes that keeps us all as safe as we may reasonably hope to be?...
