#41 - July 2006
The articles in this issue cover such a range of topics, and could be grouped in so many different ways, that it seems best to let each one simply speak for itself. Together, and along with the book reviews, they express the remarkable...
Essays
The magnitude of the destruction and human suffering triggered by Hurricane Katrina is a direct result of a profit-driven system of capitalist exploitation reinforced by the national oppression of African Americans in the US South -- a...
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I have always considered Mao Zedong’s statement, “To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing,” to be among his most valuable. Not only did it alter my conception of struggle, but it...
In the last few years, coinciding with the Bush regime’s permanent “War on Terror,” there has been an increasing tendency for military iconography to appear in the artifacts of children and youth consumer culture.1 Take, for...
In his three-part novel, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), published successively in 1975, 1978, and 1981,1 Peter Weiss accomplished for the working class what Sandra Gilbert and...
While the works of Antonio Gramsci have been studied in great depth for a number of years, his central concepts and main arguments can be applied to provide both a framework and understanding for current struggles over “globalization.”...
Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the pioneers of world-systems theory, has been arguing since the 1970s that the capitalist system, after some five centuries, is for the first time in a systemic crisis from which it will not recover, at...
Over the past three decades much has been written about the Weather Underground, often in fiction, including Don Silver’s Backward-Facing Man, Russell Banks’s The Darling, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,...
Jonah Raskin offers a valuable perspective on the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) thirty years after its dissolution and amidst its modern resurgence in popularity. His position as both an insider and an outsider makes him well-...
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The cultural expressions of outrage and resistance against the Bush Administration, so evident in rap and rock, are just as much part of contemporary blues. Since 2002 a number of blues CDs have come out that...
Book Reviews
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004)
It is hard to overstate the brilliance of this remarkable book, which contests the...
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2005).
What makes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz so compelling, both as a person and as a writer, is that...
Hugo Chávez , Marta Harnecker, translated by Chesa Boudin Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).
“...
Walter A. Davis, Death’s Dream Kingdom (London: Pluto Press, 2006)
The most important contribution of this important and wide-ranging book is its re-definition of ideology: Davis argues that ideology is...
Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kiernan Walsh Taylor, eds, American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2004).
Anticommunism played a...
Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage from Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia, 1985-2000 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
The revolutionary passage of Russia, 1985-2000, was not like other...
Seth Farber, Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005).1
My grandparents came to America from Hungary in 1912. My family who...
John Sanbonmatsu, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004)
John Sanbonmatsu offers in this book a compelling...
Melanie E.L. Bush, Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
Melanie Bush’s book presents research she conducted between 1998 and...
Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005),
Joe Berry’s book gives us some good practical advice about organizing adjunct...
David C. Brotherton and Luis Barrios, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
The current...
Daniel R. Faber and Deborah McCarthy, eds., Foundations for Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Philanthropic organizations...
Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, trans. James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
Those who have come to rely on Samir Amin’s penetrating...
Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).
This book is a thorough study of the frontiers of Caribbean tourism. It provides a wealth of...
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Dan Berger is a writer, activist, and graduate student living in Philadelphia. He is the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) and, with Chesa...