George Ciccariello-Maher, “We Created Chávez”: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)
It has been over a year since Hugo Chávez died, but so much has changed in Venezuela that one wonders at the usefulness of a book about the country written when he was still living. The present book, however, is even more valuable now than at the time it went to press.
Steve Early, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013)
Daniel Egan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His principal areas of work are political sociology and social theory. He is currently writing a book on Gramsci's concepts of war of maneuver and war of position, which is part of a larger project examining the significance of war and military doctrine in Marxist social theory. Daniel_Egan@uml.edu
This journal was born at a moment when developments in the Soviet Union put a spotlight on the relationship of democracy to socialism. For that brief period in the 1980s, the experience of Glasnost (openness) raised hopes that a formally socialist framework might indeed, despite decades of bureaucratic and often severely repressive rule, be able to accommodate a regime of uninhibited public debate.