“…from the world of Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory through to that of the Marsalis family, with the common thread being New Orleans, often cited as the birthplace of the music…an anatomy of resistance; at every stage, despite Jim Crow, gangsters and extreme violence, jazz developed and bloomed….” | more…
As a work of social history, Jazz and Justice traces the origins of Jazz in the northern part of this hemisphere, but the issues it raises are quite contemporary. As his reviewer notes, “the now-common expression ‘gig work’ originated in the jazz world. The near-endless list of Black jazz musicians who have died early deaths is testimony to the overwork the gig economy forced on them.” | more…
New from Monthly Review Press! Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change is a vibrant literary and legal feat! Essential reading for lawyers, for law students, for anyone who aspires to bend the law toward change. | more…
“…the thought was, this is the cost of doing business, and that they would externalize the cost, not just on the people of China, but on the rest of the world…China is not alone in that. The U.S. has done that, Europe has done that…the Swine flu, H1N1 that emerged in 2009 outside Mexico City, our team calls that the NAFTA flu, (from) the U.S. meat dumped onto the Mexican market….In other words we did it ourselves, in 2009, this very thing that China has also been doing for several decades.” | more…
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.” | more…
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?” | more…
Author Rob Wallace made a decision: His new book Dead Epidemiologists would take a personal approach. How could it not? While he introduces his work through this intimate lens, Wallace’s perspective is global, tracking “the implications of capitalist agricultural production, distribution and consumption that is harming the web of life….” | more…
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… | more…
“…the United States government understands that China’s scientific and electronic developments, particularly in robotics, in telecommunications, in “green technology,” and so on, has far surpassed that of U.S. and European companies, and this is an existential threat as far as the United States is concerned.” | more…
Asks Zillah Eisenstein: “Why is it that when people are talking about democracy…(there’s a) lack of recognition of the way that misogyny smothers the globe?” Clearly, democracy can take very misogynistic dimensions… | more…
How are independent and alternative media adapting and struggling in the current environment? What remains so valuable about these publications? How are independent media able to speak to issues where the “mainstream” media has proven an utter failure? | more…
“Foster and Clark show that the exploitation of wage labor in the capitalist production process is essentially tied to the expropriation of the natural world, the refusal to socially acknowledge care labor as socially necessary labor, the privatization of our common cultural heritage, the treatment of non-white communities as places where the social pathologies of capitalism (unemployment, poverty, and so on) can be concentrated, and so on. From this perspective workers, environmentalists, feminists, community activists, and anti-racists have good reason to make common cause.” | more…
In a recent review of Rob Wallace’ latest work, we are reminded that “If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations.” The review takes the time to name the culprits.. | more…