Monthly Review Press

Jennifer Laurin, on the guidance offered in “Sensing Injustice”

Jennifer Laurin, on the guidance offered in “Sensing Injustice”

February 20, 2024

"Here are a few pieces of advice I got from Michael, that I would have liked to have had earlier in my career: Make sure your case tells a story – a story of your client and a story of the law...Be wary of judicial and prosecutorial ego – but know that there are people with both power and conscience...Trust the capacity of jurors to learn and dispense justice...Decide what you want and ask for it...Don’t mistake lawyering for movement work – but don’t forget about the movement either...Believe that one case at a time can, over time, make a difference...Bring others along on your journey – and remember their contributions to it with graciousness and gratitude....."

“The Return of Nature” is a Resource for Scientific Radicals (Science for the People)

“The Return of Nature” is a Resource for Scientific Radicals (Science for the People)

February 20, 2024

The Return of Nature is a genealogy of ecological thinking. The word ‘ecology’ was not in common usage until the twentieth century, leading many to consider ecological thinking a fairly recent development. However, in this impressive volume, John Bellamy Foster convincingly identifies a materialist ecological sensibility within works dating back a century prior to ecology’s popularization..."

Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade)

Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade)

February 20, 2024

How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response.....What does this mean for today?  It means rejecting the new Cold War against Russians and Chinese and, instead, forging alliances with both. It means linking demands for reparations nationally with likeminded struggles in the Caribbean and Africa.  It means realizing that the uncanny ability of some on the U.S. left to hand rhetorical weapons to the right to bash the oppressed – from “political correctness” to “cancel culture” – is hardly a coincidence or accident but simply another expression of a “cross-class alliance” that has propped up settler colonialism from its inception.....

Gerald Horne makes you think – about the lie of the docile subject, from America to Palestine (Watch: Conscious Mindset)

Gerald Horne makes you think – about the lie of the docile subject, from America to Palestine (Watch: Conscious Mindset)

February 20, 2024

One main thread runs through every aspect of every story: Stories of Black rebellion and resistance. When Horne tells of Texas' efforts to secede and the impact of the arsons of 1860, allegedly set by slaves, he comments, "Our enemies are the ones who put out the rumor that we're docile, because they want us to be docile today."  That's fallacious, he says. "Arsons were one of our favorite tools. Arson, poisonings, insurrections, murders." And in fact, during the Madison administration, Africans actually joined the British in torching the White House in 1814, sending James and Dolly fleeing.

Repeated attempts at a coup in Venezuela have failed, an an extraordinary cost (EXCERPT: Extraordinary Threat)

Repeated attempts at a coup in Venezuela have failed, an an extraordinary cost (EXCERPT: Extraordinary Threat)

February 20, 2024

"...In 2018, Venezuela was only able to import $11.7 billion in goods, according to Torino Capital. The impact on medicine imports was especially destructive. According to U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot, while its economy was still growing in 2013, Venezuela was importing about $2 billion per year in medicine. By 2018, that amount had fallen to an astonishing low of $140 million—an especially horrifying development because medicines are much more difficult to substitute with local production than food. It is impossible to deny that a collapse in medicine imports has killed thousands of people between 2017 and 2018, as Mark Weisbrot and U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs argued in a paper published in April 2019. Weisbrot and Sachs cite a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the 2017–2018 period, according to a survey by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics. That increase works out to an extra forty thousand deaths...."

Chavista Government or Chavismo movement? (Listen: This is Hell)

February 20, 2024

Seemingly the only people supporting the opposition and their supposed leader, Juan Guaidó, are outsiders like the United States government and the Biden administration, which continues to recognize Guaidó as President despite Guaidó never getting a vote...

Michael Tigar recounts the story of Terry Nichols (Listen: For the Defense)

Michael Tigar recounts the story of Terry Nichols (Listen: For the Defense)

February 20, 2024

Federal criminal defense attorney David Oscar Markus periodically interviews famed trial lawyers about their most fascinating cases for his podcast, "For the Defense." This week, he featured Michael Tigar, published several times by Monthly Review. Markus introduces the episode: "Michael Tigar is exactly what action is all about... I mean, in 1999 there was a vote for lawyer of the century: Clarence Darrow was #1, Thurgood Marshall was #2, and you know who was #3?"

Gerald Horne with Charisse Burden-Stelly on the longue durée of apocalypse

February 20, 2024

Interviewer Charisse Burden-Stelly begins, "....apocalypse represented, for African and indigenous folks, the end of life as they knew it—that is, a life free from enslavement, genocide, and ongoing violence wrought by the insatiable drive of the group that came to be known as “whites” for endless profit. This ending was simultaneously the beginning of a capitalist world economy rooted in racial hierarchy, imperial domination, and militarized social relations, of which neoliberalism is merely the most recent enunciation."

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