#43 - March 2007
Conjuncture
The ever intensifying calls for the building of a ‘21st-century socialism’ spearheaded by Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales mark another phase in the stunning resurrection of the global left. Comprehensively different from its cold war...
To understand the current hardships of Al Quds University and other Palestinian educational institutions, it is necessary to explore the geography of Israeli occupation. This particular geography is the outcome of four decades of iron-...
‘There is no alternative.’ This has been a consistent theme of politicians, corporate officials, and intellectuals for the past twenty-five years. Global capitalism has been presented as an inevitable, irreversible process that is...
Race, Class, Empire
The idea of “race” is surely the most efficient instrument of social domination produced in the last 500 years. Dating from the very beginning of the formation of the Americas and of capitalism (at the turn of the 16th century), in the...
The field of American Studies underwent significant changes in the 1980s as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ‘60s. Native American literature for the first time became part of the canon, along with many...
He made proposals. We carried them out. -- Bertolt Brecht
Theodore Allen’s magisterial two-volume work of US labor history, The Invention of the White Race, is the product of three decades of empirical...
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers...
The Carceral State
Most people don’t quite relate US prisons to government-sponsored torture. We can thank the mainstream corporate media and politicians for this. Since the 1960s and 1970s they’ve persistently projected the false image of US prisons as...
As the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world,1 the US now imprisons over 2 million people, most of whom are poor/working class and people of color. The “gigantic experiment” (Melossi & Lettiere 1998: 42) of the US...
Radical Biography
“At twenty-five,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “I find myself full of the wildest radicalism, and look with dismay at my childhood friends who are already settled down, and have achieved babies and responsibilities.”1 In the seven...
Book Reviews
Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York and London: The New Press, 2006).
Read this book! Better, buy a dozen and give them to your friends and family. Even better, pass them out...
Carl Mirra, ed., Enduring Freedom or Enduring War? Prospects and Costs of the New American 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 2005).
This book is a valuable collection of articles, some...
Eric Stener Carlson, The Pear Tree: Is Torture Ever Justified? (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006).
In The Pear Tree, Eric Stener Carlson offers a personal meditation on the subject of torture. Carlson works...
Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006).
The Weather Underground -– an armed, clandestine, white revolutionary group that formed...
Andrew E. Hunt, David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Nobody ever said it would be easy” is the time-worn reminder in the movement...
Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer, The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America (New York: Nation Books, 2006).
"Heidegger spent his working...
Inez Hedges, Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
The story of Faust is one of the great floating signifiers of the last 500 years....
Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim, eds., Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).
In a speech given in 1975 at the University of Texas at Austin on the question of literature...
Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004);
Mat Callahan, The Trouble with...
Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
Jeff Chang, using a journalistic lens, attempts to answer the question: how does the...
Michael Perelman, Manufacturing Discontent: The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society (London: Pluto, 2005).
Capitalism loves those who love it. Thus Michael Perelman, a radical economist at...
William DiFazio, Ordinary Poverty, a Little Food and Cold Storage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
It was a cold day - winter 1984. Entering a building in the Bronx I stopped a tenant,...
Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
This seems like two books. The first is an informed and impassioned effort to...
Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson, The Bobbed-Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
On a cold night in January 1924, a small...
Stanley Aronowitz, Just Around the Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
Stanley Aronowitz’s Just Around the Corner is a timely commentary on...
Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: Biografía a dos voces (Barcelona: Random House Mondarori, 2006).
This is a “must read” book for anyone interested in Fidel Castro or the Cuban Revolution. It is a 569-page...
Luis Báez, El mérito es estar vivo (Havana: Prensa Latina, 2005).
On a visit to New York in 1995, someone asked Fidel Castro what ranked as his greatest accomplishment. The answer: “surviving” (estar...
Antonio Labriola, Carteggio [Correspondence], 1861-1904, edited by Stefano Miccolis. vols. 1-5 (Naples: Edizioni di filosofia e scienze, 2000-06).
This critical edition of the correspondence of Antonio...
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Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is a political activist affiliated with the People's Rights Movement (PRM) in Pakistan, a nationwide political confederation of working-class struggles. He also teaches history and political economy...