Monthly Review Press

Vijay Prashad via Democracy Now!–on the U.N. World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize

February 20, 2024

Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, has also written several books, most recently, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations. He appears on the Friday, Oct. 9 edition of Democracy Now! to discuss with host Amy Goodman the breaking news that the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the U.N. World Food Programme. "I couldn't be happier... This hunger pandemic is paralyzing perhaps 2.7 billion people," says Prashad. "What could only make me happier, Amy, is if, next year, the Cuban doctors win the Nobel Peace Prize..."

New! “Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution”

February 20, 2024

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...

Preventing the next disease from escaping: CounterPunch reviews “Dead Epidemiologists”

February 20, 2024

Covid-19 comes from the primary forest, from bat caves. In a world without industrial agriculture encroaching on that forest, in a world without the corporatization of a wild-food industry, Covid-19 would probably never have left those caves. As it becomes endemic, it may become unstoppable. But not so the next pestilence. If we revamp our food production system now, maybe the pathogens lurking in primeval forest viral reservoirs will stay there...

“The Horne Report” now weekly on Diasporic Music

February 20, 2024

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...

Ecology after Marx: Green Left reviews Foster’s “The Return of Nature”

February 20, 2024

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....

Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a Capitalist Virus: Spectre interviews Rob Wallace

February 20, 2024

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....

North of Oxford looks at “Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution”

February 20, 2024

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...

Gerald Horne on The Critical Hour: US Jails Privatizing Inmate Health Care See (Even) Higher Death Rates

February 20, 2024

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...."

“What’s up, Comrades?” Red Library talks to Eric Chester about “Free Speech & the Suppression of Dissent During WWI”

February 20, 2024

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...

Law & Disorder radio: from Michael Tigar & the decline of democracy to the Chicago 7 at Caroline’s Comedy Club

February 20, 2024

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...