Search results for ""monthly review press""

An intimate glimpse into the mind of a revolutionary of the civil rights movement Anne Braden was raised to be a southern belle. Instead she became a revolutionary who helped to shape the self-understanding of the entire civil rights movement. From her earliest days as a trade unionist in the radical wing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, she had been one of a small handful of white Southerners willing to take a stand against Jim Crow in the 1950s. As a journalist throughout the 1960s, she offered a penetrating, historically-grounded analysis of events which was widely read by civil rights activists. She was an informal advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; a close associate of key leaders such as Ella Baker, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Myles Horton; and a mentor to countless young revolutionaries until her death in 2006. At a time when the North American ruling class went to great lengths to prevent any semblance of continuity between movements, Braden forged direct links between the radical left of the 1930s and 40s, and that of the 1960s. Beginning with her trial for sedition in 1954, she endured constant attacks at the hands of the U.S. government, largely due to her association with Communism. And yet, as deeply as she influenced the development of the early civil rights movement, the scale of Braden's contributions and insights have either been redacted to meet the needs of the official version of civil rights movement history, or been made palatable to the very same power structure she spent her entire life working to overturn. Anne Braden Speaks corrects this distorted narrative. Finally, and for the first time, we have full access to a representative collection of Braden’s writings, speeches, and letters, and the full spectrum of their subject matter: from the relationship between race and capitalism, to the role of the South in American society, to the function of anti-communism.

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An intimate glimpse into the mind of a revolutionary of the civil rights movement Anne Braden was raised to be a southern belle. Instead she became a revolutionary who helped to shape the self-understanding of the entire civil rights movement. From her earliest days as a trade unionist in the radical wing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, she had been one of a small handful of white Southerners willing to take a stand against Jim Crow in the 1950s. As a journalist throughout the 1960s, she offered a penetrating, historically-grounded analysis of events which was widely read by civil rights activists. She was an informal advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; a close associate of key leaders such as Ella Baker, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Myles Horton; and a mentor to countless young revolutionaries until her death in 2006. At a time when the North American ruling class went to great lengths to prevent any semblance of continuity between movements, Braden forged direct links between the radical left of the 1930s and 40s, and that of the 1960s. Beginning with her trial for sedition in 1954, she endured constant attacks at the hands of the U.S. government, largely due to her association with Communism. And yet, as deeply as she influenced the development of the early civil rights movement, the scale of Braden's contributions and insights have either been redacted to meet the needs of the official version of civil rights movement history, or been made palatable to the very same power structure she spent her entire life working to overturn. Anne Braden Speaks corrects this distorted narrative. Finally, and for the first time, we have full access to a representative collection of Braden’s writings, speeches, and letters, and the full spectrum of their subject matter: from the relationship between race and capitalism, to the role of the South in American society, to the function of anti-communism.

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The first-ever English translation reveals the inner voice of a brilliant Bolshevik journalist and politician Through this dramatic history by Stefan Heym, we become intimate with the story of the maverick and internationalist Karl Radek, known as the editor of the newspaper of record throughout the Soviet era, Isvestia. Beginning as Lenin's companion at the dawning of the October Revolution, Radek later became Stalin’s favorite intellectual – only to find himself entangled in the great purges of the late 1930s and scripting his own trial. In this, his last historical novel, Heym reveals Radek as a brilliant Bolshevik journalist and politician who found himself at every turn of the wheel of fate. A central figure of the communist world, Radek was such a controversial and perennially ambiguous personality that even his historical biography seems a work of fiction. With his thick glasses and most non-Aryan appearance, marked by what some might have seen as distinctively Jewish argumentative skills and humor, Radek’s enormous talent as a writer, political acumen, and continuous curiosity carried him through event after event. In the struggles of the revolutionary movement Radek changed sides several times and came into conflict with Stalin, was exiled to Siberia, capitulated and resumed his editorial duties at Isvestia – only to get caught up in the purge trials and sentenced to prison, where he died. As Heym sculpts credible conversations with Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Trotsky, Stalin, and many others (all seen from Radek’s perspective) we come to know Radek as a man haunted by the fear that the insurgency will cease to move forward, living his life as a frenzied chase in pursuit of the continuation of the revolution, until the very end. Originally published in Munich in 1995, this first-ever English translation of Radek fashions the inner voice of a unique figure in the global revolutionary wave of the first half of the twentieth century.

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In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: it is the U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by U.S. backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela. This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed? by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism or its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the U.S. empire must not allow to succeed.

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Quiet as it’s kept inside the United States, the Cuban Revolution has achieved some phenomenal goals, reclaiming Cuba’s agriculture, advancing its literacy rate to nearly 100 percent—and remaking its medical system. Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost. Don Fitz combines his deep knowledge of Cuban history with his decades of on-the-ground experience in Cuba to bring us the story of how Cuba’s health care system evolved and how Cuba is tackling the daunting challenges to its revolution in this century. Fitz weaves together complex themes in Cuban history, moving the reader from one fascinating story to another. He describes how Cuba was able to create a unified system of clinics, and evolved the family doctor-nurse teams that became a model for poor countries throughout the world. How, in the 1980s and ‘90s, Cuba survived the encroachment of AIDS and increasing suffering that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then went on to establish the Latin American School of Medicine, which still brings thousands of international students to the island. Deeply researched, recounted with compassion, Cuban Health Care tells a story you won’t find anywhere else, of how, in terms of caring for everyday people, Cuba’s revolution continues.

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“Today more than ever, we need to listen to critical voices from the Venezuelan grassroots, and this is exactly what Venezuela, the Present as Struggle gives us. Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert have gathered the tools we need to navigate the treacherous straits between state and movements, economic crisis and sanctions, and to chart a radical course toward socialism.” —George Ciccariello-Maher, author, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chavez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people – especially the Chavista masses – do and think in these times of social emergency. Denying us their stories comes at a high price to people everywhere, because the Chavista bases are the real motors of the Bolivarian revolution. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chavez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives. Comprised of a series of compelling interviews conducted by Cira Pascual Marquina, professor at the Bolivarian University, and contextualized by author Chris Gilbert, the book seeks to open a window on grassroots Chavismo itself in the wake of Chavez’s death. Feminist and housing activists, communards, organic intellectuals, and campesinos from around the country speak up in their own voices, defending the socialist project and pointing to what they see as revolutionary solutions to Venezuela’s current crisis. If the Venezuelan government has shown an impressive capacity to resist imperialism, it is the Chavista grassroots movement, as this book shows, that actually defends socialism as the only coherent project of national liberation.

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On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors—streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers—fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this with without police—and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. Chances are you’ve never heard of it. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why. Winslow describes how Seattle’s General Strike was actually the high point in a long process of early twentieth century socialist and working-class organization, when everyday people built a viable political infrastructure that seemed, to governments and corporate bosses, radical—even “Bolshevik.” Drawing from original research, Winslow depicts a process that, in struggle, fused the celebrated itinerants of the West with the workers of a modern industrial city. But this book is not only an account of the heady days of February 1919, it is also about the making of a class capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes—what E.P. Thompson once referred to as "the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the common people."

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Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

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Why, asks Pem Davidson Buck, is punishment so central to the functioning of the United States, a country proclaiming “liberty and justice for all”? The Punishment Monopoly challenges conventional American historiography. It focusses on the constructions of race, class, and gender upon which the United States was built, and which still support racial capitalism and the carceral state. After all, Buck writes, “a state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites. Those struggles led to the creation of the low-wage working classes that capitalism requires, locked in by a metastasizing white supremacy that Buck’s ancestors, with many others, defined as white, helped establish and manipulate. Examining those foundational struggles illuminates some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century: the exploitation and detention of immigrants; mass incarceration as a central institution; Islamophobia; white privilege; judicial and extra-judicial killings of people of color and some poor whites. The Punishment Monopoly makes it clear that none of these injustices was accidental or inevitable; that shifting our state-sanctioned understandings of history is a step toward liberating us from its control of the present.

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If you're lucky enough to be employed today in the United States, there's about a one-in-ten chance that you're in a labor union. And even if you re part of that unionized 10 percent, chances are your union doesn't carry much economic or political clout. But this was not always the case, as historian and activist James Young shows in this vibrant story of the United Electrical Workers Union. The UE, built by hundreds of rank-and-file worker-activists in the quintessentially industrial town of Erie, Pennsylvania, was able to transform the conditions of the working class largely because it went beyond the standard call for living wages to demand quantum leaps in worker control over workplaces, community institutions, and the policies of the federal government itself. James Young's book is a richly empowering history told from below, showing that the collective efforts of the many can challenge the supremacy of the few. Erie's two UE locals confronted a daunting array of obstacles: the corporate superpower General Electric; ferocious red baiting; and later, the debilitating impact of globalization. Yet, by working through and across ethnic, gender, and racial divides, communities of people built a viable working-class base powered by real democracy. While the union's victories could not be sustained completely, the UE is still alive and fighting in Erie. This book is an exuberant and eloquent testament to this fight, and a reminder to every worker employed or unemployed; in a union or out that an injury to one is an injury to all."

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Sickened by the contamination of their water, their air, of the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing them. It is now clearer than ever that capitalism is also degrading the Earth s ability to support other forms of life. Capitalism s imperative to make profit at all costs and expand without end is destabilizing Earth s climate, while increasing human misery and inequality on a planetary scale. Already, hundreds of millions of people are facing poverty in the midst of untold wealth, perpetual war, growing racism, and gender oppression. The need to organize for social and environmental reforms has never been greater. But crucial as reforms are, they cannot solve our intertwined ecological and social crises. Creating an Ecological Society reveals an overwhelmingly simple truth: Fighting for reforms is vital, but revolution is essential. Because it aims squarely at replacing capitalism with an ecologically sound and socially just society, Creating an Ecological Society is filled with revolutionary hope. Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who have devoted their lives to activism, Marxist analysis, and ecological science, provide informed, fascinating accounts of how a new world can be created from the ashes of the old. Their book shows that it is possible to envision and create a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable. And possible not one moment too soon for society to change fundamentally and be brought into harmony with nature."

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Sickened by the contamination of their water, their air, of the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing them. It is now clearer than ever that capitalism is also degrading the Earth s ability to support other forms of life. Capitalism s imperative to make profit at all costs and expand without end is destabilizing Earth s climate, while increasing human misery and inequality on a planetary scale. Already, hundreds of millions of people are facing poverty in the midst of untold wealth, perpetual war, growing racism, and gender oppression. The need to organize for social and environmental reforms has never been greater. But crucial as reforms are, they cannot solve our intertwined ecological and social crises. Creating an Ecological Society reveals an overwhelmingly simple truth: Fighting for reforms is vital, but revolution is essential. Because it aims squarely at replacing capitalism with an ecologically sound and socially just society, Creating an Ecological Society is filled with revolutionary hope. Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who have devoted their lives to activism, Marxist analysis, and ecological science, provide informed, fascinating accounts of how a new world can be created from the ashes of the old. Their book shows that it is possible to envision and create a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable. And possible not one moment too soon for society to change fundamentally and be brought into harmony with nature."

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According to renowned Marxist economist Samir Amin, the recent Arab Spring uprisings comprise an integral part of a massive "second awakening" of the Global South. From the self-immolation in December 2010 of a Tunisian street vendor, to the consequent outcries in Cairo's Tahrir Square against poverty and corruption, to the ongoing upheavals across the Middle East and Northern Africa, the Arab world is shaping what may become of Western imperialism - an already tottering and overextended system.The Reawakening of the Arab World examines the complex interplay of nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent seasons. Beginning with Amin's compelling interpretation of the 2011 popular Arab explosions, the book is comprised of five chapters - including a new chapter analyzing U.S. geo-strategy. Amin sees the United States, in an increasingly multi-polar world, as a victim of overreach, caught in its own web of attempts to contain the challenge of China, while confronting the staying power of nations such as Syria and Iran. The growing, deeply-felt need of the Arab people for independent, popular democracy is the cause of their awakening, says Amin. It is this awakening to democracy that the United States fears most, since real self-government by independent nations would necessarily mean the end of U.S. empire, and the economic liberalism that has kept it in place. The way forward for the Arab world, Amin argues, is to take on, not just Western imperialism, but also capitalism itself.

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In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El Pais, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El Pais (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar's eye for complexity with a journalist's hunger for the facts.

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In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El Pais, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El Pais (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar's eye for complexity with a journalist's hunger for the facts.

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Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

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Written to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the first predominantly anti-capitalist revolution in the world, Mexico's Revolution Then and Now is the perfect introductory text and one that will also sharpen the understanding of seasoned observers. Cockcroft provides readers with the historical context within which the revolution occurred; explains how the revolutionary process has played out over the past ten decades; tells us how the ideals of the revolution live on in the minds of Mexico's peasants and workers; and critically examines the contours of modern Mexican society, including its ethnic and gender dimensions. Well-deserved attention is paid to the tensions between the rulers and the ruled inside the country and the connected tensions between the Mexican nation and the neighboring giant to the north. Mexico's Revolution Then and Now also explores the possibility of Mexico's revolutionary history finally bearing the fruit long hoped for by the country's disenfranchised-a prospect kept alive by the unyielding struggle of the last one hundred years. This is the definitive introduction to one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

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In his new extensively revised and expanded edition of this book, Samir Amin suggests new approaches to Marxian analysis of the crisis of the late capitalist system of generalized, financialized, and globalized oligopolies following on the financial collapse of 2008. Considering that Marx's Capital, written before the emergence of imperialism as a decisive factor in capitalist accumulation, could provide no explanation for the persistent "underdevelopment" of the countries of the "global South," Amin advances several important theoretical concepts extending traditional Marxian views of capitalist evolution. Most strikingly, he proposes adding to the model of reproduction in Volume II of Capital a Third Department of Production devoted to surplus absorption, necessitated by the capitalist tendency constantly to produce an economic surplus too large to be realized by the consumption and investment purchases generated within Marx's original two-department model. Equally interesting is his theoretical concept of "imperialist rent," derived from the scaling of radically different wages paid for the same labor in countries of the North and the South, whose effect has been to provide Northern capital with sufficient profits to permit it to pacify for a long period its conflict with the Northern proletariat. To account for this new type of rent he extends the Marxian "law of value" in the form of a "law of globalized value" whose operations determine such changes in the polarized world system as the industrial growth of many Third-World nations within the global imperialist context. Amin sees the present crisis as a moment in the second long crisis of the capitalist system, dating from the early 1970's (the first long crisis, he maintains, lasted from 1873 until 1945). He sees no exit from repeated crises under capitalism except the descent into barbarism. The challenge is not to escape from the crisis of capitalism-a hopeless project-but to escape from capitalism in crisis. And Amin reasserts his historical optimism as to the socialist project. He expects a "second wave" of socialist attempts that will stem from the self-liberating efforts of the nations and peoples of the South which, by eliminating the imperialist rent, will lead to an awakening of the Northern popular classes to join the awakening of the global South. This book has an important place among the theoretical resources for anyone involved in the study of contemporary Marxian economic and political theory.

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In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word "genocide." They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word "genocide" is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set of rules applies to cases such as U.S. aggression in Vietnam, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Indonesian slaughter of so-called communists and the people of East Timor, U.S. bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, the U.S. war of "liberation" in Iraq, and mass murders committed by U.S. allies in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo. Another set applies to cases such as Serbian aggression in Kosovo and Bosnia, killings carried out by U.S. enemies in Rwanda and Darfur, Saddam Hussein, any and all actions by Iran, and a host of others. With its careful and voluminous documentation, close reading of the U.S. media and political and scholarly writing on the subject, and clear and incisive charts, The Politics of Genocide is both a damning condemnation and stunning expose of a deeply rooted and effective system of propaganda aimed at deceiving the population while promoting the expansion of a cruel and heartless imperial system.

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