Category: Monthly Review Press /

Ruling Class Rethinks Juneteenth⁠—While Overlooking Black Liberation

Ruling Class Rethinks Juneteenth⁠—While Overlooking Black Liberation

Dr. Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse, spoke to Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman, hosts of By Any Means Necessary, via Radio Sputnik, Washington DC, about the "incomplete" narrative of Juneteenth embraced by the political establishment, the role of class collaboration in the construction of white supremacy in the US, and why corporate moves to dispose of racist iconography reflect the growing power of the anti-racist movement. Listen to the whole show, or begin with Gerald Horne, at hour two...

How Big Agriculture & Capitalism Are Making Pandemics Like Coronavirus More Likely: Rob Wallace on RT

How Big Agriculture & Capitalism Are Making Pandemics Like Coronavirus More Likely: Rob Wallace on RT

Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, talks to Afshin Rattans, host of RT's Going Underground, about how, in recent history, deforestation and land use changes driven by global capital have caused more epidemics, and why the emergency response to the latest Coronavirus is ineffective at solving problems such as deadly pathogens...

Gastronomica reviews “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism”

Gastronomica reviews “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism”

A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism is at once a primer on the world’s dominant economic structure and a broad analysis of the food system that it has created. Eric Holt-Giménez persuades his readers that fluency in capitalism is essential to anyone seeking to effect change within the food system...

How does L.A.’s racial past resonate now? Gerald Horne joins a discussion

How does L.A.’s racial past resonate now? Gerald Horne joins a discussion

To explore what's going on now in the streets, in light of how "Black people’s lives have remained vulnerable and unprotected by the very government that abolished the institution of slavery," Marcus Anthony Hunter, chair of the department of African American Studies at UCLA, and author of three books, assembled five noted authors and journalists of color, including Gerald Horne, author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse...

Seattle’s General Strike 100 Years Ago Shows Us Hope for Today: Labor Notes reviews Cal Winslow’s book

Seattle’s General Strike 100 Years Ago Shows Us Hope for Today: Labor Notes reviews Cal Winslow’s book

For five days in 1919, union members took control of the city of Seattle. They arguably ran it better, and certainly more justly, than it had ever been run before. ¶ Thousands of workers volunteered to keep Seattle’s essential services operating. People were fed at 21 different locations; on February 9, volunteers served more than 30,000 meals. Milk distribution was organized at 35 locations. Garbage was picked up. No crime was reported during these five days.... ¶ Contrast Seattle 1919 with today’s unfolding horror. We’re all witnessing what it looks like when a shutdown and the provision of essential services are administered by capital and a pro-corporate government. ¶ The Seattle General Strike was not just an event in labor history. It was a testament to what workers can achieve when they organize, and it has sharp lessons for today....

The Point Is to Change It: Dollars & Sense reviews Yates’s “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

The Point Is to Change It: Dollars & Sense reviews Yates’s “Can the Working Class Change the World?”

Yates begins with a detailed description of the world-wide working class. Who they are: most wage laborers, the reserve army of labor (unemployed, involuntary part-timers and discouraged workers), unpaid reproductive workers, and most peasants and laborers. How many: several billion spread across the globe. According to Yates, there are more people in the working class than many might suppose....

Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America review “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism”

Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America review “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism”

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster’s excellent 2011 book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, is essential reading for ecosocialists and environmentalists of any political tendency. At 160 pages, the book does an exceptional job of describing how capitalism is directly connected to ecological degradation and why its abolition is necessary in preventing ecological catastrophe. This review will attempt to summarize the fundamental arguments of the book and its case for ecosocialism. The book goes over more than discussed below, so make sure to read the whole thing for more useful information and details....

New! “The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century”

New! “The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century”

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed....