The working class of Cuba played a much more decisive role in the Revolution than previously understood. Steve Cushion contends that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerrillas operating in the mountains. From illegal strikes to sabotage to armed conflict with the state, workers’ efforts helped clinch the Revolution’s victory. A fresh and provocative take on the place of the working class in Cuban history. | more…
Left Forum is the largest annual gathering of the broad Left in the United States. Each year thousands of conference participants come together to discuss pressing local, national, and global issues; to better understand commonalities and differences, and alternatives to current predicaments; or to share ideas to help build social and political movements to transform the world. Left Forum 2015 drew 4,000 participants for 400 panels and events. Recent speakers include Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera, Slavoj Zizek, Marina Sitrin, Amy Goodman, Immortal Technique, and Grace Lee Boggs. | more…
Compared to other world-shaking revolutions of the modern era, the Haitian Revolution and its impact have largely been invisible to many in the West.
Confronting the Black Jacobins, Gerald Horne’s new book, revisits the revolt and the period immediately after. A historian who has written numerous works about colonialism and slavery, Horne dives deep into the decades after the revolution — up to 1874 in fact, to more clearly demonstrate the far-reaching reverberations of the revolution from the United States to Europe to the formation of the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola and a long and troubled history. | more…
By John Smith Winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award
John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities—the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone—and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. Meticulously researched and
Many environmentalists disdain the ideas of Karl Marx. Some tout the spiritual virtues of environmental ‛ideals.’ Some argue for individual solutions like recycling, reduced consumption and “going back to the land.” Anti-communists claim that the ecological crimes of the Stalinist-era USSR flowed from Marxism itself. John Bellamy Foster’sMarx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature counters all these ideas. It is a dense and intricate analysis of Marxist theory, its historical and scientific foundations, and how central ecological concerns are to it. | more…
“… So what shaped Lenin to become the man he did? Krausz firmly places the Russian revolutionary into historical context, from his birth in 1870 up until his premature death in January 1924…. Under harsh circumstances, long spells in prison, illegality and exile, Lenin’s personality, Krausz says, was ‘an interesting alloy of tough and gentle traits … with undoubtedly a predominance of the former’. Lenin the man emerges from this account as mentally and physically courageous, as well as emotionally sensitive. He was not only an obdurate and loyal political comrade,
Gerald Horne’s latest book is an ambitious transnational history of the United States and Cuba from the 1700s to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It focuses on the shared and interconnected histories of slavery, the slave trade, Jim Crow, and the struggles against these oppressive systems in the two regions. | more…
The reason for socialists to have an interest in the situation in Latin America today is simple; the most significant political advances in the world today are taking place in Latin America. The Chilean revolutionary Marta Harnecker’s book A World to Build is perhaps the most important English language attempt so far to analyse and to move forward the discussion on the left internationally around these changes. | more…
Ecologist, biomathematician, philosopher of science, and Monthly Review author Richard Levins died January 19 at the age of 85. John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Levins wrote several articles over the years for Monthly Review magazine, and co-authored, with Richard C. Lewontin, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health
One of his most popular Monthly Review articles was “How to Visit a Socialist Country,” MR vol. 61, no. 11
“The Hidden Structure of Violence offers a psychologically sophisticated analysis of violence, ideal for curious lay readers and students…. It might be fair to say that Pilisuk and Rountree’s analysis of violence
In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Here, he develops and deepens the analysis by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, noted political theorist and socialist historian, author of a number of books and a professor at York University for three decades, has died of cancer at her Ottawa home at the age of 73.
With Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, she was coeditor of Monthly Review magazine from 1997 to 2000. With current MR editor John Bellamy Foster, Ellen edited two books for Monthly Review Press.
