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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Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as "civil society" and "hegemony" are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci's purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci's methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of grand explanatory schemes, the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his foreword: Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society. The rigor of Santucci's examination of Gramsci's life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself.

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“In The Russians are Coming Again, Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano present an excellent and well researched effort to remind liberal America of how awful the Cold War was and how it was based on a cynical exaggeration of a largely fictional `Russian threat.’ Their warning against creating a new Cold War with post-communist Russia is well worth considering.”—David N. Gibbs, University of Arizona, author, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The Cold War waged between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 until the latter's dissolution in 1991 was a great tragedy, resulting in millions of civilian deaths in proxy wars, and a destructive arms race that diverted money from social spending and nearly led to nuclear annihilation. The New Cold War between the United States and Russia is playing out as farce – a dangerous one at that. The Russians Are Coming, Again is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies. Kuzmarov and Marciano's book is timely and trenchant. The authors argue that the Democrats’ strategy, backed by the corporate media, of demonizing Russia and Putin in order to challenge Trump is not only dangerous, but also, based on the evidence so far, unjustified, misguided, and a major distraction. Grounding their argument in all-but-forgotten U.S.-Russian history, such as the 1918-20 Allied invasion of Soviet Russia, the book delivers a panoramic narrative of the First Cold War, showing it as an all-too avoidable catastrophe run by the imperatives of class rule and political witch-hunts. The distortion of public memory surrounding the First Cold War has set the groundwork for the New Cold War, which the book explains is a key feature, skewing the nation’s politics yet again. This is an important, necessary book, one that, by including accounts of the wisdom and courage of the First Cold War's victims and dissidents, will inspire a fresh generation of radicals in today's new, dangerously farcical times.

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"The World We Wish to See" presents a sweeping view of twentieth-century political history and a stirring appeal to take political culture seriously. Samir Amin offers a provocative analysis of resistance to capitalism and imperialism and calls for a new politics of opposition. Capitalism is a global system, so ultimately any successful challenge to it must be organized on the same level: an "internationalism of peoples."Throughout the twentieth century the socialist and communist internationals, national liberation movements, and great revolutions have presented challenges to the world order. Amin provides a succinct discussion of the successes and failures of these mobilizations, in order to assess the present struggle. Neoliberalism and the drive for military hegemony by the United States have spawned new political and social movements of resistance and attempts at international organization through the World Social Forum. Amin assesses the potential and limitations of these movements to confront global capitalism in the twenty-first century. "The World We Wish to See" makes a distinction between "political cultures and conflict" and "political cultures of consensus." A new politics of struggle is needed; one that is not afraid to confront the power of capitalism, one that is both critical and self-critical.In this persuasive argument, Amin explains that effective opposition must be based on the construction of a "convergence in diversity" of oppressed and exploited people - whether they are workers, peasants, students, or any other opponent of capitalism and imperialism. What is needed is a new "international" that has an open and flexible organizational structure to coordinate the work of opposition movements around the world."The World We Wish to See" is a bold book, calling for an international movement that can successfully transcend the current world order, in order to pursue a better world. Amin's lucid analysis provides a firm basis for furthering this objective.

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"Global Flashpoints" critically examines today's neoliberal order and the new resistance movements which it has sparked across the globe. This timely and panoramic work offers penetrating historical analysis of the role of politics, religion and imperialism in shaping the contemporary crisis in the Middle East and of the prospects for the Left throughout the Islamic world. "Global Flashpoints" also explores the present state of resistance movements in Europe and the United States and highlights developments in Latin America, including Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, the recent uprising in Oaxaca, indigenous agrarian movements in Bolivia, and Brazil's landless movement. "Global Flashpoints" offers a uniquely powerful and provocative account of the worldwide struggle against imperialism and neoliberalism in the new century.

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"Through a Glass Darkly" was William Hinton's last book. It draws on a lifetime of immersion in Chinese politics and society, beginning with the seven years he spent in China, working mainly in agriculture and land reform, until 1953. On his return to the United States in that year, Hinton first encountered the distortions and misrepresentations of the Chinese Revolution that he examines in this book. Hinton defends the achievements of the Chinese Revolution during the three decades from 1948 to 1979 from its detractors both in the United States and, since 1979, in China itself. His starting point is the work of John K. Fairbank, for many years a professor at Harvard and the "dean of China Studies" in the United States. But it is not limited to critique. Instead, Hinton's critique of Fairbank leads into a wide-ranging examination of the nature of the transformation attempted in China, its social and political bases, and the causes and consequences of its policies in land reform, agriculture, combating famine, popular culture, industrialization, morality, and much else besides. Moving from large questions to concrete details, often drawn from his own experiences, Hinton brings everyday life in revolutionary China graphically to life. In a time when the distorted views first developed by U.S. critics of the Chinese Revolution are often propagated by the new Chinese elite themselves, "Through a Glass Darkly" has more than just historical relevance. For anyone wishing to understand present-day rivalries between the United States and China, Hinton shows how these began. This is a fitting completion of the work of a great scholar and revolutionary.

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The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known - a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement.

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The essays collected in Eastern Cauldron describe and explain the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, the fate of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, and above all the Palestinian conflict - in which the regional stakes are so dramatically embodied and contested. Achcar analyzes the social bases, strategies and tactics of PLO, Hizbollah, Israel and the United States from the establishment of the state of Israel to the second Intifada. He pinpoints the contradictions of the Israeli state - seeking at the same time to be Jewish and yet democratic - and the impact of these contradictions on all parties to the conflict.

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