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?...
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....
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....
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...
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...
February 20, 2024
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....
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...
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...
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...."
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...
