Monthly Review Press

The Thanksgiving Afterthoughts of Gerald Horne, via The Socialist Program w/Brian Becker

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, author of several books, including The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talked a few days ago to Brian Becker, host of The Socialist Program, about the story of the creation of Thanksgiving. This isn the first installment of an ongoing series where The Socialist Program examines the real origins of U.S. society...

Biden’s COVID Plan Is Better Than Trump’s, But Still Far From Sufficient: Rob Wallace via Truthout…

February 20, 2024

Presuming Donald Trump’s electoral defeat will lead to little more than some revenge firings, a parade of pardons for any Trump fixers still standing, and a practice run at the mechanics of a rightist coup for next time, what does a Biden administration promise us come January 2021?...

“Reconstructing Lenin” beyond the lies and distortions: LeftEast interviews Tamás Krausz

February 20, 2024

Tamás Krausz, author of Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, recently talked to Alex Anfruns of LeftEast about the premise of Krausz’s book, which asserts that Vladimir Lenin’s theoretical and political legacy is of real interest to the political left--and that only after the disappearance of the USSR can we better understand Lenin's thought and actions...

Black & Indigenous Antifascism: Gerald Horne & Nikki Taylor on The Real News

February 20, 2024

Historians Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century and Nikki Taylor, author, most recently, of Driven Towards Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and the Tragedy on the Ohio, appeared last week on the first 36 minutes of The Real New Network's new Marc Steiner Show. They talked about the history of--and resistance to--fascist violence against Indigenous and Black communities in the US...

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...

“Through the Lens of Punishment & Dispossession”–Pem Buck studies whiteness in her own family

February 20, 2024

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....

“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...

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...."

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...

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....