Category: Monthly Review Press /

Anticipating the U.S. presidential election, Gerald Horne talks to The Platypus Review

February 20, 2024

Daniel Jacobs: What led you to research the history of the 16th and 17th centuries with respect to the settler colonial project?
Gerald Horne: A number of factors led me in that direction. One is that I was looking for synthetic overviews of the 16th and 17th centuries and was unable to find those overviews. You can find studies and monographs that deal with various aspects of those two centuries and, as my footnotes suggest, I draw upon those various studies extensively. The second point is when I started on this road I was generally dissatisfied with the origin stories, which I refer to often as creation myths, of the founding of the United States of America..."

CubaSi reviews Don Fitz’s “Cuban Health Care: the Ongoing Revolution”

February 20, 2024

After the triumph of the Revolution, Cuba set phenomenal goals, the biggest of all being the remaking of its medical system as a free service for all: health as a human right. Don Fitz comprehensively charts the 61 years that transformed Cuba’s health service into one of the best in the world, where people are placed at the very heart of the system...

Via SFtv, KPFA radio: “Tell The Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan For Workers In The Twenty-First Century”

February 20, 2024

Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Rising Up with Sonali, a progressive news radio and TV show, recently spoke with Shaun Richman, author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century...

Gerald Horne on The Katie Halper Show

February 20, 2024

Historian Gerald Horne appeared recently on The Katie Halper Show and talked to Katie Halper and her cohost Jack Allison about Dr. Horne's latest book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. They discuss racism, class-consciousness, Trumpism, 2020, the Supreme Court and the creation of White Supremacy...

New! “Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I”

February 20, 2024

World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come. In Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties—the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government.

New! “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19”

February 20, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world. It shouldn’t have. Since this century’s turn, epidemiologists have warned of new infectious diseases. Indeed, H1N1, H7N9, SARS, MERS, Ebola Makona, Zika, and a variety of lesser viruses have emerged almost annually. But what of the epidemiologists themselves? Some bravely descended into the caves where bat species hosted coronaviruses, including the strains that evolved into the COVID-19 virus. Yet, despite their own warnings, many of the researchers appear unable to understand the true nature of the disease—as if they are dead to what they’ve seen...

Marx, humanity and the rift in nature: Green Left reviews “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000, brought awareness of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel’s writings on and relevance to, environmental thinking. His latest work, The Robbery of Nature, written with Brett Clark, demonstrates the importance of understanding nature and society with a Marxist perspective....

UK’s Socialist Review considers Fosters and Clark’s “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

The Robbery of Nature draws on and develops the theories of Marx and Engels to understand why capitalism has such a destructive influence on the natural world. Central to Fosters and Clark’s argument is that, under capitalism, human beings and the natural environment are the original sources of wealth, but it is only the labour of workers that generates value....

America’s settler colonialist roots explain how we see property rights: Gerald Horne on The Real News Network

February 20, 2024

Historian and author Gerald Horne, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks with Jacqueline Luqman on The Real News Network about how the colonization of the United States helped create the American obsession with property rights and property damage over people's rights...

“The revolutionary life and times of Ruth First, and her legacy” by Ronnie Kasrils

February 20, 2024

Ronnie Kasrils, activist and the author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, the story of his wife as an underground agent for the African National Congress, recently wrote about anti-apartheid leader Ruth First, who was killed by a letter bomb on August 17, 1987. Kasrils's article about First, commemorating the 38th anniversary of her death, is based on a lecture he presented on 23 August 2020. It first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, an online voice of the South African working class...