Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age, joins host Laurie Taylor with Nick Srnicek, Lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London, and Andrew Leyshon, Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, to discuss how powerful tech companies are revolutionizing the global economy.… | more…
Monthly Review Press announces its 2017 catalog. See some of the books MRP has published since 1951 – and others yet to come.… | more…
For activists in solidarity with the struggles in Greece over the last decade, the initial chapters of The Syriza Wave read like the diary of a fellow-traveler, in the best sense of the word. U.S.-born Sheehan is an intellectual, academic, and longtime activist of the Irish left. Incorporating these identities, her account of the dynamics of the now famous Democracy Rising conference in Athens provides an example of Sheehan’s incisiveness. The conference took place in July of 2015 and opened mere days after the announcement that an agreement had been reached for a third austerity memorandum between the Troika and the Syriza government.… | more…
Marta Harnecker, author of A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, explains “How do read Capital today, lessons from Latin America.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung… | more…
Michael A. Lebowitz, author of several MRP books, among them, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, explains that “If you don’t understand the Second Product in Capital, you understand nothing.” This talk took place at the international conference, “150 years Karl Marx’s Capital, Reflections for the 21st century,” January 14-15, in Athens, Greece. The conference was sponsored by the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung.… | more…
Saturday March 4, 3:00-4:45pm
Mulberry Street Public Library
10 Jersey St. (btwn Lafayette and Mulberry Sts.) Community Room
New York, NY 10012… | more…
‘The socialist imperative,’ according to Michael A. Lebowitz, is to ‘end capitalism and build a society of associated producers oriented to the full development of human potential.’ To move beyond capitalism, to understand how capitalism is failing and why it ought to be superseded today, as a matter of urgency, is the primary purpose of Lebowitz’s The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, a collection of essays based mostly on previous papers, books, and contributions. ‘The necessity to end the capitalist system and to replace it with that inverse situation oriented to the worker’s own need for development is undeniable’ insists Lebowitz. ‘Very simply,’ he concludes his first chapter, ‘if we are to have any dreams, we must end capitalism now, by all means possible….’… | more…
The United Electrical Workers Union, built by hundreds of rank-and-file worker-activists in the quintessentially industrial town of Erie, Pennsylvania, was able to transform the conditions of the working class largely because it went beyond the standard call for living wages to demand quantum leaps in worker control over workplaces, community institutions, and the policies of the federal government itself. James Young’s book is a richly empowering history told from below, showing that the collective efforts of the many can challenge the supremacy of the few.… | more…
Q: You are coming to Greece for a Conference on the actuality of Marx’s theoretical system. In the midst of a severe international financial crisis, what lessons can we draw from Marx’s critique of political economy?
MH: I believe it is incredible how Marx anticipated what would happen in the world in regards to the development of the capitalist mode of production. To name only a few things: he announced the tendency to concentrate more and more in less hands (look at transnationals today), the conscious technical application of science to the process of production in general and especially to the exploitation of soil (look at robotic and transgenic agriculture), the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime (look at globalization), and so on. … | more…
London-based trade union activist Steve Cushion has written an invaluable contribution to our understanding of victory of the Cuban revolutionary forces in 1959 by focusing on the role of organized labor in the defeat of the Batista dictatorship. Leaning heavily on the labor archives of the Institute of Cuban History in Havana and interviews with participants in the struggles, Cushion fashions a well-written and well-researched account of the role of the working class struggles and their interplay with the rural guerrilla army and the armed urban under-ground….… | more…
John Smith opens his study Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century with a flashback to the collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in April 2013. With more than 1000 garment workers killed, it was ‘one of the worst workplace disasters in recorded history.’ Smith emphasizes that its occurrence in a country with some of the most exploited workers on the planet is hardly coincidental. Rather, it is a stark reminder of a brutal global regime serving the interests of capital and disregarding the lives of millions of people feeding it, most of whom live in what was once known as the ‘Third World’ and is today commonly referred to as the ‘Global South.’… | more…
