May Day Books Blog

“The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy – Minqi Li, 2008 While your favorite philosopher is pondering the dialecti...

“How to Rob an Armored Car,” by Iain Levison, 2009 Ian Levison is a college-educated guy who held many working-class jobs, and chose to writ...

This 23-minute Al-Jazeera video on the US jobs crisis seems to be informative. It seems to be clear to me that for any substantial change, ...

I'm loath to write a post that is essentially just giving a link to a site most readers of this blog probably go to anyway; Ron Jacobs, ...

Liars Poker, by Michael Lewis, 1990 I’ve spent some time cleaning up the elephant dung from a bond trading floor, so this book strikes hom...

Thirteen is a science fiction novel by Richard Morgan, published perhaps two or three years ago, and set about a century in the future. The...

How many ways do I loathe liberals and progressives? Let me count the ways .... One thing in particular that arouses my ire is the emphasis ...

“ Reinventing Collapse” – Dmitry Orlov, 2008 Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-born peak-oil theorist who also visited the Soviet Union / Russian Fe...

And the pox on social democrats as well: In a word, social-democrats are capitalists who imagine themselves socialist or want to reform the ...

Fredric Jameson's review of Zizek's "The Parallax View" (of which Mayday has at least a couple of copies in stock) came o...

I found this enlightening essay by Ulrich Rippert a day or so back: The rightward evolution of the trade unions arises out of fundamental f...

I confess I can't bear to sit through any politician's speeches. But for those who must listen to the speeches of Obama, here is on...

“Empire of Illusion – the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” by Chris Hedges, 2009 Chris Hedges is famous for writing the anti-...

As Mayday's distinguished (albeit unpaid) foreign correspondent in Europe, I suppose I should cite this article in today's Independ...

I read the articles of Paul Craig Roberts with keen appreciation; he has a knack for explaining seemingly complex things in pellucid and suc...

“Ecological Revolution,” by John Bellamy Foster, 2009 Marxist theory has been crossing the desert. Recent Marxist theorists either make co...

NOTHING IS TOO GOOD FOR THE RICH ! supreme court rules...Money talks........shit walks. “...the Supreme Court will remain what it has been d...

“Rock and Roll,” by Tom Stoppard, first produced June 2006, England – Park Square Theatre, St. Paul, 2010 Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslo...

An edifying essay by David Michael Green on Obama's first year: Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most ine...

One of the few bright spots in the recent development of the labor movement is the election of Rich Trumka as president of the AFL-CIO. A qu...

“ Embedded With Organized Labor,” by Steve Early, 2009 This is the first book on labor reviewed on these pages. This is not an accident. Lik...

We've had requests for a book club at Mayday in the past, with intermittent success. Let me know by commenting if this idea appeals to y...

This notion of a "workers' state" continues to bother me (though my apprehensions may be misplaced). As I understand it, the s...