Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chávez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people—especially the Chavista masses—do and think in these times of social emergency. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chávez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives… | more…

For months now, we’ve read news stories of how people inside prisons are “sitting ducks” for COVID-19. In fact, incarcerated people across the country are dying at increasing rates in detention facilities where masks are often nonexistent and social distancing impossible. Although most of these prisons are government-run, around 10% are owned privately by corporations, which intensively put profits before the humanity it cages. Dr. Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse joins hosts Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon on Radio Sputnuk’s The Critical Hour to discuss a Reuters article reporting that “jails with health care overseen by private companies incur higher death rates on average than those with care handled by government agencies….” | more…

Next year Monthly Review Press will publish Tigar’s memoir, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change. But for now, he discusses, with Smith and Boghosian, the bipartisan decline of democracy and rule of law, Amy Coney Barrett, the presidential election… If you hang on toward the end, you’ll hear an old recording, in the wake of the newly released The Trial of the Chicago 7, of William Kunstler, a lead attorney for the seven, performing a routine about the trial at Caroline’s Comedy Club… | more…

Pem Davidson Buck is the author of Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky and, more recently, The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. Her work involves the study of whiteness, discourses on inequality, incarceration, and the state formation of punishment. Here, introduced by Harry Targ, she discusses her work in “Through the Lens of Punishment and Dispossession: The Building of the United States,” an online presentation sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Buck begins by talking about Venis, an enslaved woman in the 1740s, who, Buck presumes, was, seven generations back, the source of her immigrant family’s race and class privilege in the US…. | more…

Historian and author Gerald Horne can now be heard every Sunday on Diasporic Music, blackpower96.org, from 3:30 to 4:00pm, Eastern time. Here, he talks with Norman “Otis” Richmond (a/k/a Jalali) and Malinda Francis (a/k/a Mali Docuvixen) about world politics, from New Zealand to Mexico, adding in Ishmael Reed, Stanley Crouch, Brooklyn, and the antidemocratic aspects of jazz… | more…

The Return of Nature is essentially a sequel to John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology published twenty years earlier. In this new work Foster examines the ecological thought of those who came after Karl Marx and were influenced by his philosophy, politics and ecology. ¶ Among the theorists that Foster examines, the ideas of socialism they held and their relations to the socialist movement were of various forms. But an important unifying thread which informed their ecological thinking is the materialist and dialectical critique that originated with Marx…. | more…

I am not a fan of the oppressive government of Cuba where there is no vote, no guarantee of freedoms we here in the United States take for granted. As with all the revolutions in the last century based on Marxist philosophy the Cuban revolution devolved into a cult of personality. Unlike the others, Russian elitism and Chinese embrace of corporate identity to support the establishment as opposed to utopia, Cuba did establish two elements foreign to other Marxist revolutions. Cuba established an outreach of medical care for the poor and rural and a literacy campaign to educate the population… | more…

Eric T. Chester, author of the newly released Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, talks to Comrade Adam (a.k.a. Chairman Bane), host of the Red Library podcast, about the differing contexts of suppression of free speech in the UK and the U.S., Eugene Debs, the IWW, Samuel Gompers and the ALF-CIO legacy, and some of the legendary IWW strikes and labor drives during the period… | more…

RW: As far as Trump getting COVID-19, I think it’s a spectacle and palace intrigue – it serves as a distraction. The very fact that he contracted it is at the same time stupefying, astonishing, and yet utterly predictable…. | more…

We live in a world that is facing a profound and deepening ecological and social crisis. People are searching for an understanding of how this all happened, and what can be done about it. In The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology John Bellamy Foster has written a comprehensive account of the many socialist thinkers who have developed ecological critiques of society. It is essential reading for all who want to change the world…. | more…

Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author–most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse–appears in this Powerhouse Arena launch for the publication of The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a play written by poet, essayist, and playwright Ishmael Reed. Originally produced at the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Haunting dismantles the phenomenon of Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Broadway hit musical, Hamilton. Reed uses the musical’s crimes against history to insist on a radical, cleareyed look at our past… | more…

Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author, talks with Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair on radio WORT-FM, Madison, WI, about Horne’s most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Dr. Horne retells the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas; how “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and how “genocide and mass enslavement is somehow a step forward for humanity.” He also offers examples of how colonial history manifests in the present day, including the Founding Father worship of the hit musical Hamilton and the growing popularity of QAnon conspiracies…. | more…

Helena Sheehan is a well-known and well-established presence on the Irish Left, an activist-academic with a strong form in meditative Marxist thought as well more accessible political commentary. As she shows in her new memoir, Navigating the Zeitgeist, it would be almost too obvious to say she led an interesting’ life, moving from post-war suburbia and a brief period as a nun, to communism and Irish republicanism; she narrates each of these stages of her life in a fast-moving and engaging (but not always problem-free) style…. | more…