Monthly Review Press

The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past (FAIR publishes ‘Extraordinary Threat’ excerpt)

The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past (FAIR publishes ‘Extraordinary Threat’ excerpt)

It is worth summing up some of these key lies: 1) Venezuela was “once prosperous.” In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth; 2) Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo....

Gerald Horne: From a Jim Crow hospital to the American Book Award

Gerald Horne: From a Jim Crow hospital to the American Book Award

Born in a Jim Crow hospital. Attended racially segregated “apartheid schools.” Grew up in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, an area similar to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and home to several prominent Black businesses that were erased forever by racially motivated construction projects...

Beyond enthusiasm for an imagined anti-capitalism (Los Angeles Review of Books reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”)

Beyond enthusiasm for an imagined anti-capitalism (Los Angeles Review of Books reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”)

It is with this attentiveness to the historic shortcomings and duplicity of left organizations that Yates rejects so-called democratic socialism, which even in its heyday failed to fundamentally challenge capitalism. Setting our sights on the mere (and, as history shows, inevitably temporary) reform of a fundamentally exploitative system instead reflects a colossal failure of imagination akin to the prisoner who spends all his energy advocating for a larger window in his cell...