In his timely new book, David Gilbert addresses a subject that could not be more relevant: the white working class in the United States. He brings a much-needed historical perspective to current debates around the politics and identity of white workers, then and now. | more…
Ideas and theories can only play a limited part in tackling the climate crisis, but at least they should not act as obstacles to understanding and action. In his new book, Andreas Malm maps those obstacles and proposes a path through them. | more…
Sara Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is a brave monograph that analyzes the way that the discourses of Europe’s right-wing nationalists, government agencies, and liberal feminists converge in their representations of Muslim and non-western immigrant women, relegating these communities to commodified spheres of social reproductive work. | more…
Amid deep disparities between states, the act of moving across borders becomes a way of re-politicizing the very idea of states, borders, and nations—concepts that have for centuries been taken for granted and excluded from debate. | more…
As the global economy grows increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW’s pioneering tactics, and perhaps even the union itself, may again be the means by which working people of all walks secure “the good things in life” while building “a new society within the shell of the old.” | more…
At their best, worker cooperatives are among the most effective examples of radical democracy in action. A recent vogue for cooperatives as high-tech entrepreneurial endeavors, however, seeks to expand rather than challenge the rule of market economics. | more…
From 1972 to 1989, an obscure sect of Danish Maoists developed a unique synthesis of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, theories of imperialism and unequal exchange, and legal and illegal practice that distinguishes it from any other group then active in Europe or North America. | more…
Scholars, scientists, politicians, and others are moved to write about climate change for a variety of reasons, including scientific advance, political influence, and public education. For the late Del Weston, the reason was clearly love—for people and for the earth. | more…
In 2014, after years of grassroots organizing, a coalition of progressives transformed Richmond, California into the largest city in the United States governed by a Green Party mayor. But Richmond is not just Anytown: its economy and government has been dominated for a century by a giant Chevron refinery, and by a racist political machine determined to keep the city’s working-class and nonwhite majority out of power. | more…
Ahmed White’s vivid and deeply researched account of the Little Steel strike of 1937 makes an important contribution to our understanding of U.S. labor history, union organizing, and class conflict. It illustrates the tactical complexity of strikes, reveals the power and ruthlessness of employers, and demonstrates the risks of relying on the state to secure justice for working people. | more…
In Acting Like It Matters, James McEnteer gives a compassionate account of John Malpede—actor, activist, and co-creator of the political theatre troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—and of the Skid Row community that is the organization’s heart and soul. The story of Malpede and the LAPD is one of life as art and art as life, and its protagonists are the dehumanized homeless citizens of Los Angeles and their compatriots in cities across the United States and the world, who represent a growing part of today’s global working class pushed out of the formal economy. | more…
The United States maintains about 800 military installations around the world, and the number is growing, despite partial withdrawals of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and scaling back of major European bases. The continued expansion…has come mainly through a series of smaller “lily pad” installations, originally proposed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that are now being built in Africa, Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond.… [David] Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University [and author of Base Nation], visited more than sixty current or former bases in twelve countries and territories. Although scholars such as Chalmers Johnson, Cynthia Enloe, and Catherine Lutz, as well as contributors to Monthly Review, have for decades sounded the alarm about the ever-expanding global network of U.S. military bases, Vine’s new study provides a comprehensive update, persuasively documenting the ways that “far from making the world a safer place, U.S. bases overseas can actually make war more likely and America less secure.” | more…
In the early 1950s, Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado moved from a rural Cuban sugar plantation to Havana, to live with her younger brother Abel. Together, they would help to establish a revolutionary movement that would change the history of their country. Haydée, as she is known throughout Cuba—Yeyé to her friends—was one of only two women among 160 men who took part in attacks on Batista’s army barracks at Moncada and Bayamo on July 26, 1953, which sparked the Cuban Revolution.… In her recent book, poet and scholar Margaret Randall, who lived in Cuba in the 1970s and became friends with Haydée, has captured the essence of this exemplary woman. | more…