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…
Rather than isolating Cuba, economic sanctions have isolated the United States | 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…
By Jane Franklin
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…