Category: Monthly Review Press /

Ecology after Marx: Green Left reviews Foster’s “The Return of Nature”

February 20, 2024

The Return of Nature is essentially a sequel to John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology published twenty years earlier. In this new work Foster examines the ecological thought of those who came after Karl Marx and were influenced by his philosophy, politics and ecology. ¶ Among the theorists that Foster examines, the ideas of socialism they held and their relations to the socialist movement were of various forms. But an important unifying thread which informed their ecological thinking is the materialist and dialectical critique that originated with Marx....

“The Horne Report” now weekly on Diasporic Music

February 20, 2024

Historian and author Gerald Horne can now be heard every Sunday on Diasporic Music, blackpower96.org, from 3:30 to 4:00pm, Eastern time. Here, he talks with Norman “Otis” Richmond (a/k/a Jalali) and Malinda Francis (a/k/a Mali Docuvixen) about world politics, from New Zealand to Mexico, adding in Ishmael Reed, Stanley Crouch, Brooklyn, and the antidemocratic aspects of jazz...

“Through the Lens of Punishment & Dispossession”–Pem Buck studies whiteness in her own family

February 20, 2024

Pem Davidson Buck is the author of Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky and, more recently, The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. Her work involves the study of whiteness, discourses on inequality, incarceration, and the state formation of punishment. Here, introduced by Harry Targ, she discusses her work in "Through the Lens of Punishment and Dispossession: The Building of the United States," an online presentation sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Buck begins by talking about Venis, an enslaved woman in the 1740s, who, Buck presumes, was, seven generations back, the source of her immigrant family's race and class privilege in the US....

Law & Disorder radio: from Michael Tigar & the decline of democracy to the Chicago 7 at Caroline’s Comedy Club

February 20, 2024

Next year Monthly Review Press will publish Tigar's memoir, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer's Life in the Battle for Change. But for now, he discusses, with Smith and Boghosian, the bipartisan decline of democracy and rule of law, Amy Coney Barrett, the presidential election... If you hang on toward the end, you'll hear an old recording, in the wake of the newly released The Trial of the Chicago 7, of William Kunstler, a lead attorney for the seven, performing a routine about the trial at Caroline's Comedy Club...

New! “Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution”

February 20, 2024

Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chávez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people—especially the Chavista masses—do and think in these times of social emergency. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chávez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives...

Gerald Horne on The Critical Hour: US Jails Privatizing Inmate Health Care See (Even) Higher Death Rates

February 20, 2024

For months now, we've read news stories of how people inside prisons are "sitting ducks" for COVID-19. In fact, incarcerated people across the country are dying at increasing rates in detention facilities where masks are often nonexistent and social distancing impossible. Although most of these prisons are government-run, around 10% are owned privately by corporations, which intensively put profits before the humanity it cages. Dr. Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse joins hosts Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon on Radio Sputnuk's The Critical Hour to discuss a Reuters article reporting that "jails with health care overseen by private companies incur higher death rates on average than those with care handled by government agencies...."

Preventing the next disease from escaping: CounterPunch reviews “Dead Epidemiologists”

February 20, 2024

Covid-19 comes from the primary forest, from bat caves. In a world without industrial agriculture encroaching on that forest, in a world without the corporatization of a wild-food industry, Covid-19 would probably never have left those caves. As it becomes endemic, it may become unstoppable. But not so the next pestilence. If we revamp our food production system now, maybe the pathogens lurking in primeval forest viral reservoirs will stay there...

Vijay Prashad via Democracy Now!–on the U.N. World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize

February 20, 2024

Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, has also written several books, most recently, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations. He appears on the Friday, Oct. 9 edition of Democracy Now! to discuss with host Amy Goodman the breaking news that the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the U.N. World Food Programme. "I couldn't be happier... This hunger pandemic is paralyzing perhaps 2.7 billion people," says Prashad. "What could only make me happier, Amy, is if, next year, the Cuban doctors win the Nobel Peace Prize..."

Gerald Horne and Aisha Cort on Black Internationalism, Communism, and Cuban History

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and author of many books, most recently, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks to Luna Olavarria Gallegos and Aisha Cort, hosts of Havana-based Belly of The Beast Cuba about Black radical traditions in respect to Cuba and the United States...

Gerald Horne Traces the Long History of White Supremacy, via WORT FM’s “A Public Affair”

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author, talks with Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair on radio WORT-FM, Madison, WI, about Horne's most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Dr. Horne retells the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas; how “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and how “genocide and mass enslavement is somehow a step forward for humanity.” He also offers examples of how colonial history manifests in the present day, including the Founding Father worship of the hit musical Hamilton and the growing popularity of QAnon conspiracies....