Search results for ""monthly review press""

What is civilization? The term, commonly identified with "uplift" and "order," has come to take on another meaning: the "civilized" versus the "primitive." This book is about the idea of civilization and how, at different times, the concept has been used by the powerful in order to defend their status. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early societies, anthropologist Thomas C. Patterson shows how class, sexism, and racism have been integral to the appearance of "civilized" societies in Western Europe.

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This economic study seeks to cut through the intellectual fashions that assume a global capitalist triumph, taking the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Marx and Engels' tract, "The Communist Manifesto" to focus upon the aspirations of the destitute millions of the post-Cold War era. Samir Amin examines the changing notions of crisis in capitalism; misconceptions of the free market model; the various distortions of Marx's method; the role of culture in revolutions; the decline of the "law of value" in economics; the philosophical roots of postmodernism; how telecommunications affect ideology; and the myth of "pure economics".

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Big changes in the global economy and world politics have put new questions on the table for labour movements around the world. Can workers regain the initiative against the tidal wave of corporate downsizing and government cutbacks? Is labour rising from the ashes? Focusing upon recent developments in the United States, this volume sets these decisive questions about labour against a global backdrop, connecting and contrasting the new American scene to recent developments abroad - from Mexico to Asia, from Canada to Eastern Europe. It provides analysis of the key issues being debated by labour scholars and activists: the changing composition of the international working class; patterns of work under contemporary capitalism; the relationship of race and gender to class; the promise and limitations of recent eruptions of labour militancy; and the strategic options available to the labour movement in today's conditions.

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This pathbreaking collection of essays recasts the prevailing conceptions of the historical roots and role of the U.S. Communist Party and its social setting. The contributors focus on the movement that formed around the party and the popular culture it expressed, particularly in the period from 1930 to 1960. They look at the impact of the party and its followers in the areas of education, literature, and the arts, in the African-American community, and on the women's and labor movements. In their preface, the editors place the book in the context of the broader critical examination of the history of the left in the United States. By analyzing the historical reasons for the party's appeal and its relationship to those outside its ranks, the volume contributes to a fuller understanding of the broader societal context within which all oppositional movements are formed. Contributors (in order of appearance in book): Michael E. Brown, Mark Naison, John Gerassi, Stephen Leberstein, Ellen Schrecker, Rosalyn Baxandall, Roger Keeran, Gerald Horne, Annette T. Rubinstein, Marvin E. Gettleman, Alan Wald, and Gil Green (interviewed by Anders Stephanson).

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Within a year after the triumphal entry into Havana at the beginning of 1959, Che Guevara began to set down the history of the guerrilla war. Fearful that the events would "dissolve into the past" and that an important part of the history of America would be lost, he urged other leaders of the Revolution to do the same, asking only "that the narrator be strictly truthful." His history of the war appeared episodically during the next few years in various Cuban periodicals such as Verde Olivo and Bohemia. In 1963, the Havana publishing house Ediciones Union collected nineteen episodes under the title Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria. This volume, originally published in 1968, contains diagrams of several battles, photographs, and maps of the guerrilla itinerary in the Sierra Maestra. The introduction by Fidel Castro consists of the text of his speech in memory of Guevara at the Plaza de la Revolucion in 1967. "He wrote with the virtuosity of a master of our language," said Castro. "His narratives of the war are incomparable. The depth of his thinking is impressive. He never wrote about anything with less than extraordinary seriousness, with less than extraordinary profundity-and we have no doubt that some of his writings will pass on to posterity as classic documents of revolutionary thought."

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“The armed rebellion of poor peasants that began fifty years ago in Naxalbari, India, continues to this day. Bernard D'Mello sets out the story of its origins and uneven development, in historical context. The armed struggle lives on because the conditions that gave rise to it not only persist, but are yet more severe. To understand the present and future of India, this story is essential. And Bernard D’Mello's brilliant account has no equal.”—John Mage, International Lawyer Although the 1967 revolutionary armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari, at the foot of the Indian Himalayas, was brutally crushed, the insurgency gained new life elsewhere in India. In fact, this revolt has turned out to be the world’s longest-running “people’s war,” and Naxalbari has come to stand for the road to revolution in India. What has gone into the making of this protracted Maoist resistance? Bernard D’Mello’s fascinating narrative answers this question by tracing the circumstances that gave rise to India’s “1968”decade of revolutionary humanism and those that led to the triumph of the “1989” era of appallingly unequal growth condoned by Hindutva-nationalism, the Indian variant of Nazism. Will what remains of India’s continuing “1968” bring twenty-first-century “New Democracy” to the collective agenda? Or will the ongoing regression of “1989” lead the way to full-blown semi-fascism and sub-imperialism? India after Naxalbari is far more than a simple history of the ongoing Naxalite/Maoist resistance; it is a deeply passionate and informed work that not only captures the essence of modern Indian history but also tries to comprehend the present in the context of that history – so that the oppressed can exercise their power to influence its shape and outcome.

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A bold new collection of the writings of Miroslav Krleza, in English for the first time Miroslav Krleza was a giant of Yugoslav literature, yet remarkably little of his writing has appeared in English. In a body of work that spans more than five dozen books, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays, Krleza steadfastly pursued a radical humanism and artistic integrity. Harbors Rich in Ships gives English-speaking readers an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate the astonishing breadth of Krleza's literary creations. Beautifully translated by Zeljko Cipris, this collection of seven representative early texts introduces a new audience to three stories from Krleza's renowned antimilitarist book, The Croatian God Mars; an autobiographical sketch; a one-act play; a story from his collection of short stories; One Thousand and One Deaths; and his signature drama, The Glembays, a satirical account of the crime-ridden origins of one of Zageb's most aristocratic families. Born in 1893 Zagreb, then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Miroslav Krleza died in 1981 Zagreb, after it had become part of Croatia, a republic in socialist Yugoslavia. He was educated in military academies that served the Hapsburg monarchy, however, after fighting on the Eastern Front during the First World War, he was sickened by the War's lethal nationalism and became a fervent anti-militarist. Krleza joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1918, but his opposition to Stalin's artistic dictum of social realism, as well as his refusal to support Stalin's purges, led to his expulsion from the Party in 1939. He nevertheless helped found several literary and political journals, and became a driving force in Yugoslavia's literature. This collection will help readers of all interests and ages see just why Krleza is considered among the best of the literary moderns.

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More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton's Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China's revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, "Fanshan" is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. "Fanshen" continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and China's complex social processes. This classic volume includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.

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With historical and economic detail, this book explores the reasons why a global economic system, geared toward private profit, has spelled vulnerability for the earth's fragile natural environment. It sets out to take the case for saving the planet beyond visions of doom, arguments about sustainability, and individual solutions.

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A World Turned Upside Down? poses two overarching questions for the new period opened by the Trump election and the continued growth of right-wing nationalisms. Is there an unwinding of neoliberal globalization taking place, or will globalization continue to deepen, but still deny the free cross-border movement of labor? Would such an unwinding entail an overall shift in power and accumulation to specific regions of the Global South that might overturn the current world order and foster the disintegration of the varied regional blocs that have formed? These questions are addressed through a series of essays that carefully map the national, class, racial, and gender dimensions of the state, capitalism, and progressive forces today. Sober assessment is crucial for the left to gain its political bearings in this trying period and the uncertainties that lie ahead.

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Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers - above all, the United States. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention - discovering new "Hitlers" as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938. Jean Bricmont's "Humanitarian Imperialism" is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries. Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont's book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.

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Are we now in an age of "postmodernity"? Even as some on the right have proclaimed the "end of history" or the final triumph of capitalism, we are told by some intellectuals on the left that the "modern" epoch has ended, that the "Enlightenment Project" is dead, that all the old verities and ideologies have lost their relevance, that the old principles of rationality no longer apply, and so on. Yet what is striking about the diagnosis of postmodernity is that it has so much in common with older pronouncements of death, both radical and reactionary versions. What has ended, apparently, is not so much another, different epoch but the same one all over again. In response, today's intellectuals on the left seem to be returning to historical materialism, to class analysis. This collection reflects that move, pinning postmodernism in its place and time. It exposes the erroneous bases of "pro-mo" premises, by identifying the real problems to which the current intellectual fashions offer false - or no - solutions. In so doing, the contributors challenge the limits imposed on action and resistance by those who see liberating "new times" in the contradictions of contemporary capitalism.

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