#70 - March 2016
We pay tribute to two individuals who have greatly contributed to our work and who died recently--Ellen Meiksins Wood and Richard Levins.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was a leading Marxist political theorist. Her rigorous...
A Socialist Economy?
The large majority of articles written outside Cuba about its process of “updating” its economic model (appropriately) address what they consider the economic effects, both of what has already been implemented, and of what will come...
Debating Political Reform
Cuba’s Organs of People’s Power (OPP) function at three levels: municipal, provincial and national. There are 168 municipal assemblies. The City of Havana, because of its size, is divided into several municipalities, with the city as a...
The Cuban socialist project is in a period of transition. This transition is unfolding in conditions dictated by an underdeveloped economy, a persistent domestic economic crisis even though the economy is in the process of recovering,...
Introduction
Cuba enters the twenty-first century with a system of social relations in a profound process of change. This presents a clear challenge to the socialist project. It is absolutely necessary to improve...
Democratic republicanism has been central to major events like the French Revolution or the Spanish Republic, and now inspires changes underway in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. The socialist movement, like Jacobinism, is part of the...
We remain convinced the people of Cuba would be best served by genuine democracy, where people are free to choose their leaders, express their ideas, practice their faith; where the commitment to economic and social justice is realized...
Left Politics
Whoever does not hope/expect, shall not find the unexpected; arduous is the search for and the access to it. -- Heraclitus, 540-480 BNE
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or...
‘It is true that to be free, may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes or to run mortal risks.’ -- Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
“In the Netherlands we have...
Working-Class Culture
I
In his collection of essays entitled The Bone Won’t Break: On theatre and hope in hard times, the Liverpool-born playwright John McGrath (1935-2002) points to the systematic social,...
What man would follow art - one of the most uncertain and unremunerative professions - who hadn’t a deep faith in the social value of his vision. -- Rockwell Kent
The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red...
Book Reviews
Lecia Rosenthal, ed. Radio Benjamin (London, NY: Verso, 2014), 394 pages, $29.95
Esther Leslie, trans. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (London, NY: Verso, 2015...
Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: A New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 436 pp., $19.95
Slavoj Žižek’s output is prodigious. Since 2012, he has published seven books, of which...
Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography [trans. Balint Bethlenfalvy with Mario Fenyo] (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 552 pp., $34
It is no easy task that Tamás...
Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 220 pp., $16.95.
Few historical figures are as complex, perhaps even as seemingly contradictory, as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as...
Sean Matgamma (ed.), The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: Debates, essays and confrontations of post-Trotsky (London: Workers Liberty, 2015), 780 pp., $30.
Not so many decades ago, Susan Sontag...
Lucia Pradella, Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx's Writings (New York: Routledge, 2015), 218 pp., hardcover, $155
While many heralded the collapse of the Soviet...
Klaus Dorre, Stephan Lessenich, and Hartmut Rosa, Sociology, Capitalism, Critique (New York: Verso Press, 2015), 342 pp., $24.95.
As sociology became further embedded in the academy, the production of...
Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement (New York: Verso, 2014), 192 pp., $26.95.
Stanley Aronowitz's critique of American labor unions is searing without...
Seamus O’Malley, Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 296 pp., $53.
Seamus O’Malley’s Making History New seeks to insert modernism...
Randy Martin, ed. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 2015), 348 pp., $240.
Randy Martin, a professor at New York University who founded and chaired the program in Arts...
Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso 2015) 148 pages, $23.95
Familiar to socialists, anarchists, and other radicals is the historical significance of the...
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Al Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Utah, and a longtime member of the Steering Committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics. His research interests are the nature of...