Come hear author and historian Jane Franklin present her recently updated book: Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History
Discussion, Q & A, and book signing to follow
Richmond Public Library, Madeline F. Whittlesey Community Room
325 Civic Center Plaza
Richmond, CA 9430 | more…
Helena Sheehan did not become a friend of Greece only because of the crisis. She begins her new book The Syriza Wave writing, “Greece lived in my imagination long before I set foot in it….” Sheehan studied philosophy, became a philosopher, a professor at Dublin University, and wrote important books like Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History. For 25 years, she monitored the political situation in Greece. At the start of the crisis, she was one of the first in Europe to highlight the rise of the left in the south and to play a part in the creation of a dynamic pan-European solidarity movement. | more…
In light of Mexican President Nieto’s cancellation of his White House visit, James D. Cockroft, author of Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now, discusses with Brian Becker, host of Loud & Clear, what it means that two Trump cabinet members—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly—have gone to Mexico to meet with the president. Is there any chance for badly damaged Mexican/American relations to improve? Meanwhile, Mexican people are in the streets. They’re angry not just at Trump but at their own government. Might there a massive, cross-border protest and resistance? | more…
The “Black Jacobins” referenced in this book’s title will be familiar to readers of eighteenth-century Atlantic and Caribbean history, in addition to those who study slavery, antislavery, and abolition, and of course to students of the Haitian Revolution. C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, first published in 1938 and then reissued in 1963, rang (indeed, rings) with an urgent and eloquent Pan-African politics, often openly tied to contemporary issues, | more…
Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age, joins host Laurie Taylor with Nick Srnicek, Lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London, and Andrew Leyshon, Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, to discuss how powerful tech companies are revolutionizing the global economy. | more…
Monthly Review Press announces its 2017 catalog. See some of the books MRP has published since 1951 – and others yet to come. | more…
For activists in solidarity with the struggles in Greece over the last decade, the initial chapters of The Syriza Wave read like the diary of a fellow-traveler, in the best sense of the word. U.S.-born Sheehan is an intellectual, academic, and longtime activist of the Irish left. Incorporating these identities, her account of the dynamics of the now famous Democracy Rising conference in Athens provides an example of Sheehan’s incisiveness. The conference took place in July of 2015 and opened mere days after the announcement that an agreement had been reached for a third austerity memorandum between the Troika and the Syriza government. | more…
Marta Harnecker, author of A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, explains “How do read Capital today, lessons from Latin America.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung | more…
Michael A. Lebowitz, author of several MRP books, among them, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, explains that “If you don’t understand the Second Product in Capital, you understand nothing.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. | more…
Saturday March 4, 3:00-4:45pm
Mulberry Street Public Library
10 Jersey St. (btwn Lafayette and Mulberry Sts.) Community Room
New York, NY 10012 | more…
‘The socialist imperative,’ according to Michael A. Lebowitz, is to ‘end capitalism and build a society of associated producers oriented to the full development of human potential.’ To move beyond capitalism, to understand how capitalism is failing and why it ought to be superseded today, as a matter of urgency, is the primary purpose of Lebowitz’s The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, a collection of essays based mostly on previous papers, books, and contributions. ‘The necessity to end the capitalist system and to replace it with that inverse situation oriented to the worker’s own need for development is undeniable’ insists Lebowitz. ‘Very simply,’ he concludes his first chapter, ‘if we are to have any dreams, we must end capitalism now, by all means possible….’ | more…
The United Electrical Workers Union, built by hundreds of rank-and-file worker-activists in the quintessentially industrial town of Erie, Pennsylvania, was able to transform the conditions of the working class largely because it went beyond the standard call for living wages to demand quantum leaps in worker control over workplaces, community institutions, and the policies of the federal government itself. James Young’s book is a richly empowering history told from below, showing that the collective efforts of the many can challenge the supremacy of the few. | more…
Q: You are coming to Greece for a Conference on the actuality of Marx’s theoretical system. In the midst of a severe international financial crisis, what lessons can we draw from Marx’s critique of political economy?
MH: I believe it is incredible how Marx anticipated what would happen in the world in regards to the development of the capitalist mode of production. To name only a few things: he announced the tendency to concentrate more and more in less hands (look at transnationals today), the conscious technical application of science to the process of production in general and especially to the exploitation of soil (look at robotic and transgenic agriculture), the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime (look at globalization), and so on. | more…