Category: Monthly Review Press /

Via The Intercept: Gerald Horne on the Revolutionary Life of Paul Robeson, Antifascist Singer, Artist, & Rebel

February 20, 2024

Jeremy Scahill, host of Intercepted, a podcast series sponsored by The Intercept, looks to the life of artist and communist thinker Paul Robeson, as a lodestar to guide us through these crisis times. Robeson's lifelong devotion to empowering workers and overthrowing fascists around the world was connected to the liberation of Black people in the United States. Professor Gerald Horne, author of Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary and, more recently, The Dawning of the Apocalypse joins Scahill to help elucidate Robeson's vision and radical contributions...

Five days that shook Seattle: Real Democracy Movement reviews Cal Winslow’s history of the General Strike

February 20, 2024

“Over a century ago a historic general strike took place in Seattle on the Pacific North-West coast the like of which had not been seen before in the United States and it is fair to say, not since. In fact, this kind of total shut down verging on revolution has happened a mere handful of times anywhere....”

Samir Amin’s Swansong Does Not Disappoint: Marx & Philosophy on “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

For many of us the later writings of a great thinker offer a particular allure—the mature reflections on a life’s work, the winnowing of major themes and long-term passions, the admissions of mistakes or the elation of being proved right all along. Sometimes these swansongs disappoint, but not this one! For those of us who have studied and gained much from Amin’s many writings over the years, the opportunity to have in one relatively compact volume some final thoughts on the key arguments advanced and elaborated over a long and productive career is extremely valuable....

This Is Revolution podcast: Gerald Horne discusses uprisings “From Watts to George Floyd”

February 20, 2024

Jason Myles, host of the podcast This Is Revolution, talks to Dr. Gerald Horne, author of, most recently, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century about this time of massive uprisings, not just in the United States, but all over the world, and the possibility of actually pushing for real systemic change--especially regarding the police...

Marx indeed lives, Saito says–but whose Marx? Houston Review on “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Every revolutionary struggle must fight not just for the future but also for the past. Marx’s work has been foreclosed by its detractors as backwards and naive; if Walter Benjamin was right that even the dead shall not be safe if the enemy is victorious, then Marxists today must accept their defeat.... However, what is always obscured in this move to foreclose the past is the dynamism and constant change in Marx’s thought and the scope of his life’s work.... Just as Juliet Mitchell returned to Freud to correct and expand feminist analysis of patriarchy and psychic development for women, ecosocialists have increasingly returned to Marx to carve out a new path to the future by returning to the past....

New! Cuban “Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution”

February 20, 2024

Quiet as it’s kept inside the United States, the Cuban revolution has achieved some phenomenal goals, reclaiming Cuba’s agriculture, advancing its literacy rate to nearly 100 percent—and remaking its medical system. Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost. In Cuban Health Care, Don Fitz combines his broad knowledge of Cuban history with his decades of on-the-ground experience in Cuba to bring us the story of how Cuba’s health care system evolved and how Cuba is tackling the daunting challenges to its revolution in this century....

THIS IS HELL! Brings you “Apocalypse dawning: Slavery & capital across the transatlantic 16th century”

February 20, 2024

Chuck Mertz, host of This Is Hell (broadcast across Chicago on WNUR since 1996), talks with historian Gerald Horne about his latest book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Horne explores the terrains of race, religion, capital and slavery across the 16th century trans-Atlantic world. As European powers pillaged Africa and the Americas of people and resources, their destruction created the enduring formations of life in the 21st century--white supremacy and rapacious capitalism...

Zillah Eisenstein asks … “WHY NOW, White People?”

February 20, 2024

Zillah Eisenstein, political thinker, activist, and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently wrote an article for Ideas & Futures about how, during the onslaught of COVID-19, white people must stay vigilant against anti-Blackness. “It is a time,” she writes, “to be uncomfortable.”

The War on Black Dissent, Part I: Black Lives, Red Scares featuring Gerald Horne

February 20, 2024

Chip Gibbons, host of the podcast Still Spying | Presented by Defending Rights & Dissent interviews author and historian Gerald Horne about Black Lives/Red Scares: the history of the FBI's war on Black dissent. This is part I of a multi-episode series. Listen, below, or at Still Spying

Science & Society reviews two books by the late Samir Amin: “The Long Revolution” & “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International
By Samir Amin, reviewed by Molly Giedel
Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution
By Samir Amin, reviewed by Chris Vials