In 2002 Anne Daly produced a documentary called Race to the Bottom, provoked by a fire that killed fifty-two workers in a garment factory in Bangladesh. John Smith’s book begins with the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, when another garment factory collapsed and 1,131 workers died. Clearly, the race to the bottom continues…. ¶ Along with other examples of intensified exploitation, smartphone manufacture, and coffee-growing, John Smith connects the outsourcing of production to the lowest-wage economies with the nature of capitalism today. | more…

One of three sons of immigrant jews from Bialystok, Poland, Louis “Studs” Terkel was born on May 16, 1912, in New York City. In 1922, Studs moved with his parents and his two brothers to Chicago, where he lived for the rest of his life. Actor, disc jockey, author, raconteur, husband and father, Studs is probably best known as host of the The Studs Terkel Show from 1952 to 1997 on Chicago’s WFMT. The program earned him the title of ‘Mr. Chicago’ and many people in the city have said they always knew it was between ten and eleven in the morning if they caught an earful of his radio program…. | more…

This seminal and original study of contemporary imperialism should be on every militant’s bookshelf, not least because it is tightly argued, exhaustively researched and unashamedly Marxist throughout. ¶ John Smith’s central argument is that the decline in manufacturing in the Western industrialised countries, and its rise in the so-called Third World, are part of a deliberate strategy by transnational corporations to exploit low wages, underpinned by appalling working conditions, in order to realise super profits…. | more…

Everyone remembers the 1,133 deaths from the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse. But who knows about Bangladeshi workers who earn just one euro cent for every 18 T-shirts they make, and take home €1.36 after a ten or 12 hour day? ¶ Ultimate villains of this ‘super-exploitation’ are corporate buyers from the Global North and race-to-the-bottom capitalist market competition. ¶ John Smith uses such atrocities to expose the ways that conventional statistics understate the value of outsourced commodities created in the Global South…. | more…

“…In the world of the word, Studs Terkel was a multi-talented man. He was an actor, a playwright, an organizer, a deejay, and an interviewer, among other things. Mostly, however, as Alan Wieder makes clear in his newly-published biography of Terkel, he was an ‘interpreter of America.’ His ability to not only listen, but also to ask the right questions of an interviewee, made his radio shows and books of oral history not only informative and enjoyable; those interviews became the standard to which others strived to achieve. It was as if Terkel had a certain magic once the tape recorder was turned on…..” | more…

John Marciano, author of The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?, talks with journalist and author Sasha Lilley on radio KPFA‘s “Against the Grain” about the horrors wreaked on Vietnam during the American war there, and how the U.S. government would like us to remember them now | more…

On October 2, Gerald Horne, author of several books, including Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic and Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow, sat down with Peter Slen on C-SPAN‘s “In Depth” to discuss his work and the history of the United States | more…

Alan Wieder, author of Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation, talks with Wallace Chapman on Radio New Zealand‘s weekly show, “Sunday Morning”
“Wieder says that wherever Terkel was, he believed people had something to say.
Terkel captured Chicago’s racism in the ’70s through an interview with a policeman for his book Working: People who talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do…” | more…

Recently, Nancy Stout, author of One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, was interviewed for an article in the Smithsonian magazine, titled, “How Cuba Remembers Its Revolutionary Past and Present” | more…

Recently, MRP author Alan Wieder talked to longtime radio host Marc Steiner of WEAA 88.9 FM about his new book, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation | more…

Wednesday, September 28 at The Workmen’s Circle, 247 W. 37th Street, 6-8:00pm
Thursday, September 29 at Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, 7-9:30pm | more…