Category Archives: Volume 19, No. 2

Mark Zepezauer, Take the Rich Off Welfare, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2004) The heart of this book, which was originally published in 1996, is in its opening pages, where Zepezauer presents the formulas upon which his rich … Continue reading →

The Philosophic Ambiguities of C.L.R. James — John H. McClendon III, C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism?  (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004). A significant shortcoming of the many studies on C.L.R. James is the lack of attention, if … Continue reading →

Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: Briefwechsel Januar 1858 bis August 1859. Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe III/9. Edited by Vera Morozowa, Marina Uzar, Elena Vaščenko and Juergen Rojahn, in cooperation with Ursula Balzer, Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung Amsterdam (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2003). [1301 pp.] With the present volume, … Continue reading →

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Scholars of the social world have argued that regardless of the topic one is studying, there are certain variables that are always present, even if, at first glance, they … Continue reading →

David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (University of California Press, 2002). David Roediger’s most recent book is a gem.  This collection of readable essays helps us to better appreciate what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “color line” … Continue reading →

Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism (Westport: Praeger, 2003). This is a book a political lifetime—or two, or three, or more—in the making.  The organized Italian-American Left has been relatively slight, one of the … Continue reading →

Robert J.S. Ross, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Immanuel Ness, Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Samuel Gompers, the English immigrant … Continue reading →

America’s Guantánamo Gulag By Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishers, 2004). On the Caribbean island of Cuba stands a foreboding outpost of American imperial  power—Guantánamo Naval  Base.  There, … Continue reading →

One of the key struggles of the current period, one that poses a great challenge to the Left, involves state control of borders and the movement of people.  Canadian and US governments, under the cover provided by September 11, are … Continue reading →

An attempt to prioritize strategic objectives for the Left, toward pushing social forces beyond capitalism here in amerika or abroad, should begin with determining the primary contradictions between the oppressed social forces and those that do the oppressing.  Three contradictory … Continue reading →