In the last five years, three women have written biographies of Ernesto “Che” Guevara after five decades of his life story being solidly in the hands of men. The question is: do women write biography differently? Lucia Alvarez de Toledo is the most explicit about the issue of being a woman biographer. She points out that The Story of Che Guevara (Harper Collins, 2011), has been written by a Latin American, a native of Buenos Aires and a woman. Whatever the advantages of those territorial factors, it seems clear that her account benefits as well from her talent for critical analysis and willingness to go over old territory to find facts anew. No less important is its vantage point: a woman’s point of view. Partly because Alvarez was her subject’s contemporary and compatriot, this biography provides interesting details of and insights into Che’s youth and the environment that shaped him, information either unknown to or ignored by earlier biographers. | more…

Wealthy and powerful countries have a variety of mechanisms available to them to control the fates of peoples in poor countries. These are not mutually exclusive, and most of poor countries have experienced more than one of these types of interventions. The use of propaganda, targeting populations both in the periphery and the metropole, was studied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988, and since. The power of financial institutions in controlling the economies of dependent countries has been documented by many scholars, among them, for Haiti, Paul Farmer. US interventions specifically designed for electoral processes through State Department–sponsored organizations and others (called “democracy promotion”) have been analyzed by William Robinson and other scholars, including Nicholas Guilhot. | more…

This 51st annual Socialist Register completes the investigation of class formation and class strategies on a global scale begun with last year’s volume. Deploying an understanding of class as an historical social process—rather than an abstract sociological category or statistical artifact—the essays here investigate the concrete ways that working classes are being made and remade in the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity, and authoritarian governments. Taking stock of the changing balance of class forces as well as old and new forms of workplace, household and political organization, they uncover the class strategies being debated and adapted in different zones of the world. | more…

Gerald Horne discusses his two books, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (published by New York University Press) and Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (published by Monthly Review Press), at Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, California.  | more…

Marsh shares his affection for Walt Whitman in this gentle, thoughtful consideration of the poet’s relevance to 21st-century America. Beset by moral malaise in his 30s, the author “suffered from fully-grown doubts, not just growing doubts, about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country.” Whitman’s insights on death, money, sex and democracy buoyed his spirits …. Marsh confesses his love for the legendary poet, and by the end of this insightful homage, readers are likely to feel the same.  | more…

Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. | more…

José Carlos Mariátegui, a creative Marxist thinker and activist from Peru, who was born in 1894 and died in 1930, was once not widely known in the English-speaking world. Over the last few decades, however, more and more people have learned about his life and works, and in 2011, MR Press was proud to publish a comprehensive anthology of his writings, edited and translated by the scholars Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker. Now, we’re pleased to present José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology as our November book of the month. Receive 35% off when you use the coupon code BOM1114 at checkout.  | more…

Join Gerald Horne, author of Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow, at these upcoming events in Los Angeles, California! Friday, 7 November, 7 PM, a book signing at Eso Won Bookstore, and on Saturday, 8 November, Noon to 3PM, a “Black Brown Unity Event” at the Holman United Methodist Church. | more…

Want political economy that soberly unpacks power and wealth? Read two recent books by Samir Amin who defines the system’s current stage as “generalized-monopoly capitalism.” His study of it reveals what standard economics conceals and distorts. The two books under review study the economy within the parameters of social change. Amin takes a Marxist, historic view of the system’s “grow or die” imperatives in developed and emerging nations. | more…

Foster (Univ. of Oregon) is editor of Monthly Review and one of the leading experts in Marxian political economy. In this new edition, Foster explains that the increasing tendency of monopolistic companies to control a large share of the financial industry since the 1980s has created a “financialization-stagnation trap” that is negatively affecting economies of all countries around the world. | more…