Friends and Neighbors: Remembering Pete Seeger and Camp Woodland

2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (8) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Emily Paradise Achtenberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Summer Camp ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The World

I attended Camp Woodland, a progressive summer camp in upstate New York, for four summers starting in 1955 when I was ten years old. When Pete died last year, it was my fellow Camp Woodlanders that I most wanted to connect with.&hellip; Fortunately, a camp reunion in 2012 had revived many old friendships. &ldquo;Pete&rsquo;s music was the soundtrack to our lives,&rdquo; one former camper reminisced on the camp listserv. &ldquo;Pete modeled our values and transformed how we lived in the world, just like at camp,&rdquo; another wrote.<p class="mrlink">This article can also be found at the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_blank"><em>Monthly Review</em> website</a>, where most recent articles are published in full.</p><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Coda: Being in Prison

Metamorphosis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Correctional Institution ◽  
College Degrees ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge

This concluding chapter looks at a speech conducted at the January graduation ceremony of prisoners who would receive their college degrees at the Fishkill Correctional Institution, in conjunction with programs run by Nyack College in upstate New York. It explains how graduation oratory is all about telling people to apply what they have learned in the world. The graduation speech consists of six key takeaways: the more you know, the more you realize you do not know; recognizing what you do not know is a social tool; education is self- knowledge; education is also about learning to write well; education is self- improvement; and finally, education is a place of its own.

The Scars of the Ghetto

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Lorraine Hansberry
Keyword(s):  
Pancreatic Cancer ◽  
New York ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Terminally Ill ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Short Life ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Hospital Bed ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

<div class="ed-auth-intro">The article that appears below is reprinted from the February 1965 issue of <span class="no-italics">Monthly Review</span>. Despite her small body of work and short life, Lorraine Hansberry (1930&ndash;1965) is considered one of the great African-American dramatists of the twentieth century. Her play <span class="no-italics">A Raisin in the Sun</span> (1959) is required reading, and performed regularly, in high schools and colleges nationwide, as well as on Broadway and London's West End. Hansberry's association with the left, and especially with <span class="no-italics">Monthly Review</span>, began in her teenage years. When she moved to New York, she became good friends with Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy. In spring 1964, although terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, she left her hospital bed to speak at a benefit for Monthly Review Press; her speech appeared posthumously as the article below.</div><p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-1" title="Vol. 67, No. 1: May 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Capitalist Efficiency and Socialist Efficiency

1976 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Marxian Theory ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Socialist Practice

Marxism has been blooming around the world. Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff call it "a veritable renaissance." Samir Amin celebrates an "extraordinary rebirth." Just as socialist practice has deepened and spread its roots internationally, so has Marxian theory borne increasingly rich and bounteous fruit.… The Marxian renaissance has involved some theoretical tussles with the earlier Marxist orthodoxy. These theoretical reformulations have necessarily focused on the central problematic of the materialist perspective…. With <em>Labor and Monopoly Capital</em>, Harry Braverman has provided some central elements lor this clarified focus, helping arm us with many critical arguments for our assault on traditional views.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Empire of Bases

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (7) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Zoltn Grossman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Military Installations ◽  
American University ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Donald Rumsfeld

David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan, 2015), 418 pages, $35.00, hardcover.The United States maintains about 800 military installations around the world, and the number is growing, despite partial withdrawals of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and scaling back of major European bases. The continued expansion…has come mainly through a series of smaller "lily pad" installations, originally proposed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that are now being built in Africa, Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond.… [David] Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University [and author of Base Nation], visited more than sixty current or former bases in twelve countries and territories. Although scholars such as Chalmers Johnson, Cynthia Enloe, and Catherine Lutz, as well as contributors to Monthly Review, have for decades sounded the alarm about the ever-expanding global network of U.S. military bases, Vine's new study provides a comprehensive update, persuasively documenting the ways that "far from making the world a safer place, U.S. bases overseas can actually make war more likely and America less secure."Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Cotton: The Fabric of Death

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (6) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
J. Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Commodity Markets ◽  
Global History ◽  
Agricultural Commodity ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Mortgage Crisis ◽  
Big Four

<div class="bookreview">Sven Beckert, <em>Empire of Cotton: A Global History </em>(New York: Knopf, 2014), 640 pages, $35, hardback.</div>For four years following the 2008 mortgage crisis, I worked as a cotton merchant for one of the "big four" trading firms&mdash;ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. These shadowy giants, two of them privately held, maintain oligopoly control of agricultural commodity markets. From desks in Memphis, my colleagues and I purchased mountains of cotton in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, warehoused it, speculated on it, and sold it back to mills on those same continents.&hellip; We sat at the pinnacle of a web of political and economic forces that funneled cotton into facilities we owned and cash into our accounts, but nowhere in the office was there a visible sign of the violence that made it all possible.&hellip; Too often liberal histories focus on a single period, territory, or class perspective, and end up obscuring the truth, severing the threads that tie a moment to its historical roots. Sven Beckert's <em>Empire of Cotton </em>is different. Although a liberal historian, Beckert refuses to limit his scope in the traditional way. Instead, he follows the movement of cotton across time, space, and class, bringing forward the threads that bind the objects of an otherwise distorted past.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-6" title="Vol. 67, No. 6: November 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions at Ten Years: Reflections on a Movement on the Rise

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Ajl
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Long Beach ◽  
The Real ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
Real Target

<div class="bookreview">Rich Wiles, editor, <em>Generation Palestine</em> (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 256 pages, $24, paperback.</div>When in March 2012, Barack Obama paused briefly from approving orders for drone killings of Pakistani and Yemeni villagers, in order to reassure the attendees at the annual gala of the AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) that, "when there are efforts to boycott or divest from Israel, we will stand against them," the real target of his declaration was elsewhere: the myriad grassroots organizers across the world who have made the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns unignorable. Their mounting influence has provoked efforts to declare them anti-Semitic or illegal from London to Long Beach. In fact, the series of victories across the University of California system has so annoyed its managers that they have hauled in the Caesar of domestic repression, Janet Napolitano, to deal with campus activists. Obama's declaration of support for Israeli colonialism had a simple message to those many activists: back down, because Washington will not.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-2" title="Vol. 67, No. 2: June 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

The Testing Resistance and Reform Movement

2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (10) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monty Neill
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
Testing Resistance ◽  
Standardized Exams

In the spring of 2015, more than 620,000 students refused to take state standardized exams. The numbers were stunning in some places: 240,000 in New York; 110,000 in New Jersey; 100,000 in Colorado; 50,000 in Washington; 44,000 in Illinois; 20,000 in Oregon and Florida; 10,000 each in New Mexico and Rhode Island. Statewide, the New York opt-out rate reached 20 percent, topping 70 percent in some districts. Washington's numbers represented half the grade eleven class. In several other states, high school refusals reached 15 percent.&hellip; These numbers are a huge leap over 2014, when the Opt Out movement first began to have an impact.&hellip; Leaders predict the numbers will escalate again in the March to May 2016 testing season.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

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