Maroons, self-organized communities of runaway slaves, existed wherever slavery was present. One of the most vital and persistent maroon communities was tucked away in the mountainous rainforests on the Caribbean island of Dominica, at the time a British colony. This “state within a state,” as the colonial authorities tellingly described it, posed a direct challenge to the slavery system, and before long, the Dominican Maroons rose up to challenge the British Empire. Ultimately, they were captured and put on trial. Here, for the first time, are primary documents, carefully edited and contextualized, that richly present the voices and experiences of the Maroons—in resistance and defeat.
Monthly Review author Peter Custers died at his home in Leiden, the Netherlands on Tuesday, September 3rd, of a heart attack. See obituary in the Bangladeshi newspaper, The Daily Star
Journalist, researcher, and international activist, Custers was the author of several books on Bangladesh, and of the book Questioning Globalized Militarism. With Jayati Ghosh, Peter Custers wrote Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labor in Asian Economies, published in 2012 by Monthly Review Press. He also wrote an article titled “A Different Perspective on the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal,” which appeared in the September 2009 issue of Monthly Review magazine. | more…
Contemporary history is neither a series of random occurrences nor the predetermined plaything of a small cabal of super-empowered conspirators. The truth is somewhere in-between. A sizeable cadre of class- and system-conscious deep-state and imperial planners from the heights of concentrated private and governmental power join together to shape the outlines of much of recent history. | more…
Celebrating the life of the activist and author, who died on the morning of October 5
The following essay by Grace Lee Boggs, which originally appeared in Monthly Review magazine, September 1970, is only a tiny part of her work:
Education: The Great Obsession
Education today is a great obsession. It is also a great necessity. We, all of us, black and white, yellow and brown, young and old, men and women, workers and intellectuals, have a great deal to learn about ourselves and about the rapidly changing world in which we live. We, all of us, are far from having either the wisdom or the skills that
Consistent with his characteristic jargon-free, readable style, Robert W. McChesney’s new collection, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, is a deep yet accessible primer for his decades of work on journalism, politics, and political economy. The volume showcases over a decade of McChesney’s work and provides overviews and additions to some of his most important contributions during the period, including The Death and Life of American Journalism, Digital Disconnect, and Dollarocracy. | more…
In early 1917, as Britain was bogged down in a war it feared would never end, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters, and her son were brought to trial and imprisoned for plotting the assassination of Prime Minister Lloyd George, who they believed had betrayed the suffrage movement. In this highly evocative and haunting play, British historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham illuminates the lives and struggles of those who opposed the war… | more…
There are conspiracies! Some are secret and others overt. The most important of them usually have a public and a private aspect. Yet even those with plenty of data in the full light of day are secret in one sense: they are barely known by the general public and mostly ignored by those who are supposed to be telling us what is going on and what makes things happen: scholars, journalists, and pundits. Thus the obscurity of the Council on Foreign Relations. It may surface as a tagline for the wise men and women of NPR and PBS forums, but its workings and impact remain largely unexamined. | more…
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.”
Find out more about these two upcoming events here! | more…
“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…