Rather than the standard chronological approach Krausz outlines Lenin’s politics thematically. After a concise biographical sketch the book highlights the importance of Lenin’s analysis of Russian capitalism in the future development of his politics. | more…
It would be an understatement to call Galeano’s stitching together of the South American colonial “project” in Open Veins of Latin America masterful. It is a visionary book that connects the dots between racism, pillaging, capitalism and white Eurocentric patriarchal dominance of peoples and nations. The indigenous populations and people of color have been treated as so much tinder for the fire that heats the homes and replaceable labor that fattens the pocket books of the conquerors. | more…
SF BAY AREA – SEPTEMBER 13TH, 4-6 PM
BROOKLYN, NY – SEPTEMBER 18TH, 7-9 PM
“We are honored to bring Marta Harnecker and Michael Lebowitz to the United States for a special series of conversations with movement organizers and activists committed to building more powerful people’s movements and a new type of socialist liberation for the twenty-first century…. LeftRoots is bringing these two movement intellectuals to the United States to discuss the power and potential of these ideas in the hopes of finding new ways to strengthen our struggles here in the belly of the beast.”
“Our first guest is Gerald Horne. His latest book is Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow. Dr. Horne is a Professor of African-American History at the University of Houston. He is the author of more than two dozen books…” | more…
Work sucks. Every day, workers go into jobs they hate, whether in a factory, office or on a checkout line. Workers are made to perform menial and demeaning tasks that have already been outlined for them, down to the smallest details, by management. Their job is so simple that anyone can do it. Ultimately, the worker possesses no control at the workplace. | more…
No one seriously concerned with changing the world can avoid Lenin. As Hungarian Marxist Tamás Krausz puts it, ‘the discontented keep running into Lenin’s Marxism at every turn’ (p.316). This, Krausz points out, is above all because Lenin was so central to the Russian Revolution, the first, and up to now most important, anti-capitalist experiment aimed at a stateless society.… Krausz’s book is not an introduction to Lenin, for that you have to look elsewhere.[i] But it is much more than its billing as ‘an intellectual biography’. Krausz has set himself the ambitious task of examining the principles that motivated and guided Lenin and testing how they matched up against reality. | more…
Among the strengths of Gerald Horne’s Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow is its timing; it arrives at the moment of the first real movement in US–Cuban diplomatic relations since the imposition of the blockade in 1962, and at the beginnings of what some are calling the third major US civil rights movement, in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. | more…
The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.
Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel,
In both of these books John Tully gives us histories of remarkable businesses and their human consequences seen from the vantage point of a red–green critic of capitalism. Rubber and its cousin gutta-percha were exploited long before plantation businesses sprang up. | more…
Race in contemporary Cuba is a delicate and hotly contested issue. What most agree is that pre-1959 Cuba was characterized by a stark racial inequality which, rooted in a relatively recent history of slavery (abolished only in 1886), was addressed after January 1959 by legally eliminating its more evident institutional manifestations, by a social program which particularly benefited those at the bottom of the old social structure, and by a mass emigration which initially was predominantly (83.5%) white. More recently, we know that after the 1990s’ traumatic crisis (following the Soviet and socialist bloc collapse) and the unprecedented changes to counter that crisis (including increased tourism and toleration of the U. S. dollar), inequality partly returned, as remittances from relatives abroad disproportionately benefited whites. | more…
Reconstructing Lenin is a thoughtful and compelling study of Lenin. Tamás Krausz reveals Lenin as an activist revolutionary whose thoughts were shaped by immediate political events but who also at the same time never strayed far from a coherent theoretical framework. As a work of scholarship it deserves to be up there with Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered. | more…
Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates have recently identified a political point of entry that has the potential to galvanize wide public support and focus political discussion and debate on the most glaring (historical) weaknesses of capitalism as a mode of production and to begin to nudge public awareness toward the deep contradictory ontology that is capitalism. | more…
Who is the cybertariat? Why care? Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (Monthly Review Press, 2014), has answers as a class-based technology shapes our world. An historical continuity emerges in her writing. This approach casts context on the current moment. | more…