“In the Dominican Republic, as in many other countries around the Caribbean, the political strategy of leading dominant groups in recent decades has been one of polyarchy—that is to say, the options in democratic elections have been limited to voters selecting between different factions of elites. Since the 1970s, U.S. foreign policymakers, along with an increasingly wide array of UN, EU and other international agency officials have come to promote this approach. If
Bill Fletcher (Longtime labor and social justice activist, host of The Global African TV show author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor
and Chip Berlet (Award-winning investigative journalist, author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort will discuss the rise of the right | more…
SR:Can you explain the concept of the Anthropocene and its importance for understanding the current climate crisis?
IA: Anthropocene is the proposed name for the present stage of Earth history: a time in which human activity is transforming the entire planet in unprecedented and dangerous ways. Scientists divide Earth’s 4.5 billion year history into time intervals that correspond to major changes in the conditions and forms of life on Earth….
Please come hear John Bellamy Foster deliver Burns Sisters Public Lecture at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, on “The anthropocene and the crisis of civilization: climate change and capitalism” | more…
On April 27, MRP author Jane Franklin, aided by Sandra Levinson, discussed her new book, Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History at the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City. | more…
Author of The Economic War Against Cuba and Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, Salim Lamrani is a university professor who specializes in relations between Cuba and the United States. In this interview, he turns to the issue of human rights, a point of divergence between the two countries. The United States accuses Cuba of not respecting human rights, while Cuba demands a change in the criteria. | more…
In this updated edition of her classic, Cuba and the United States, Jane Franklin chronicles U.S.-Cuba relations from the time both were colonies, through each country’s revolution, to the present. Since its first edition in 1992, published with the Center, Jane’s book has been an essential resource for all trying to understand the fraught relationship between the island and the U.S. For the traveler to Cuba. | more…
“This romantic tale of individuals, seized on by the media and by several films glorifying the guerrillas, completely ignores the towns and the role played by the powerful working class that lived in them. The organised workers — over 1.25 million of them out of a population of just 6 million at the time were in unions — are commonly seen as being, for the most part, politically inactive throughout the period of the insurrection. Nothing, in fact could be further from the truth, as Steve Cushion demonstrates in his new book. | more…
“John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century was the Inaugural Winner of the Paul A. Baran – Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Prize. According to the back cover blurb at least, it is a “seminal examination” of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.” It shows how modern day imperialism exploits oppressed nations through transfer pricing or what Smith calls “global labor arbitrage”. Output is produced at very low prices in the global “South” and then sold at much higher prices in the developed “imperialist” North. The value added is credited to the selling, not the producing nations, and so the transfer of wealth is hidden in official statistics. Explaining this is the “central task” of the book….” | more…
The Monthly Review, since its inception, has been carrying on some of the best works in radical political economy. Economists Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff set out the analytical foundations of what has come to be called the Monthly Review School | more…
Islamic State bombings in Brussels and Paris are headline news. Henry A. Giroux goes beyond that violence and the fear it generates for the back story of lawless wars, cold, hot and obscured in America’s Addiction to Terrorism. | more…
