“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…
In Lettuce Wars, Bruce Neuburger tells the story of his experience as a volunteer farm labor organizer with the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in Salinas, California, during a ten-year period beginning in the spring of 1971. Lettuce Wars is a memoir, but the author’s fascinating personal story never overshadows the history of the farmworkers movement that it also documents. | more…
In this updated edition of her classic, Cuba and the United States, Jane Franklin depicts the two countries’ relationship from the time both were colonies to the present. We see the early connections between Cuba and the United States through slavery; through the sugar trade; Cuba’s multiple wars for national liberation; the annexation of Cuba by the United States; the infamous Platt Amendment that entitled the United States to intervene directly in Cuban affairs; the gangster capitalism promoted by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista; and the guerrilla war that brought the revolutionaries to power. This is an essential research tool.
To both its supporters and detractors, the Cuban Revolution is almost universally understood as having been won by a small band of guerrillas. This book turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and argues that the Cuban working class played a much more decisive role in the Revolution’s outcome than previously understood. | more…
Has imperialism changed since Lenin wrote his seminal work, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, exactly 100 years ago? Two new books on imperialism by British Marxists help us to answer that question. The first, by Tony Norfield (The City – London and the global power of finance published by Verso Books), looks at the ‘centre’ of imperialism in the major financial hubs of mature capitalist economies. He analyses the ‘superstructure’ of modern imperialism, if you like. In the second, John Smith (Imperialism in the 21st century, published by Monthly Review Press) looks at the foundations of exploitation under modern imperialism in the ‘periphery’. These books thus complement each other and offer new insights into the economic nature of imperialism that bring Lenin’s work up to date. | more…
Baltimore, April 15, 7:30 pm: Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse (30 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21201)
Washington, DC, April 16, 3:00 pm: Sankofa Video Books & Cafe (2714 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001)
Monthly Review Press author Gerald Horne will discuss and sign his book, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic | more…
I never knew is a common refrain New World Performance Laboratory theater artists are hearing from Akron audience members after open rehearsals of Death of a Man, a new play that brings to life the mutilations and massacres that occurred in the early 1900s during the mad search for rubber in the jungles of the Amazon.
The one-man show, which is still in development, is conceived and performed by Colombian actor Jairo Cuesta, co-artistic director of NWPL. It is the first part of the company’s The Devil’s Milk Trilogy, a long-term project funded by a $15,000 Knight Foundation grant that explores Akron’s relationship with rubber…. | more…
“In the introduction to his book, Confronting Black Jacobins, Gerald Horne writes that the 1804 Haitian Revolution ‛was so profound, so important, so stunning, that it may require an entire school of historians to take its true measure.’ Arguably, he adds, this revolution—an affront to both slavery and white supremacy, bolstering revolt throughout the slave South—changed the course of history….” | more…
The Reawakening of the Arab World—an updated and expanded edition of Amin’s The People’s Spring, first published in 2012 by Pambazuka Press—examines the complex interplay of nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent seasons.
Shoup tells us that the consequences of this ‛neoliberal geopolitical empire’ has been ‛the destruction of unions and working class communities, privatization, speculation, grotesque economic inequality, ecological destruction, and … war and conquest.’ This is quite an indictment; the book is a carefully documented effort, largely successful, to provide the evidence for that description. | more…
