Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba that Fitz takes us through in the 240 compelling pages that come before. Based on that history, one would have expected Cuba to take early, decisive actions to stem the pandemic, and Fitz says that’s exactly what happened…. | more…
While vaunting itself as an oasis of democracy, the United States, in reality, has become a superpower by infiltrating foreign governments, obliterating entire cultures, and carrying out murderous military interventions in developing countries all over the world. Washington Bullets is about U.S. imperialism—the bullets sent by various Washington, DC administrations to crush revolutions, assassinate democratically elected leaders—to destroy hope…. | more…
“If you want to understand why Black Lives don’t Matter under the current system, look to the events of five hundred years ago,” says historian and University of Houston African American Studies professor, Gerald Horne. Drawing from his most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse, Dr. Horne speaks with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report about these five hundred years–and their impact on our lives today… | more…
The Seattle General Strike lasted only five days, but people have been fighting over what it means for a hundred years. Cal Winslow raises this discussion to a new level. Sticking close to the workers themselves, he shows us why the strike matters…. | more…
If you’re living in a settler-colonialist society–which is virtually all of the Americas–the seeds of fascism have been implanted because of the violent uprooting of the Indigenous population that helps to create a culture of mega-violence… They really drank the kool-aid with regard this idea of the United States being this democracy with a sturdy constitution… | more…
If they are paying attention, progressives worldwide know that Cuba provides healthcare that saves lives and prevents disease more effectively than does the United States, its major capitalist enemy. They know that Cuban health workers have been caring for people throughout the global South and, during the Covid -19 pandemic, in Europe too. And the word is out that Cuba educates vast numbers of physicians for much of the world… | more…
Ronnie Kasrils, activist and the author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, the story of his wife as an underground agent for the African National Congress, recently wrote about anti-apartheid leader Ruth First, who was killed by a letter bomb on August 17, 1987. Kasrils’s article about First, commemorating the 38th anniversary of her death, is based on a lecture he presented on 23 August 2020. It first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, an online voice of the South African working class… | more…
John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000, brought awareness of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel’s writings on and relevance to, environmental thinking. His latest work, The Robbery of Nature, written with Brett Clark, demonstrates the importance of understanding nature and society with a Marxist perspective…. | more…
World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come. In Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties—the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government. | more…
Daniel Jacobs: What led you to research the history of the 16th and 17th centuries with respect to the settler colonial project? Gerald Horne: A number of factors led me in that direction. One is that I was looking for synthetic overviews of the 16th and 17th centuries and was unable to find those overviews. You can find studies and monographs that deal with various aspects of those two centuries and, as my footnotes suggest, I draw upon those various studies extensively. The second point is when I started on this road I was generally dissatisfied with the origin stories, which I refer to often as creation myths, of the founding of the United States of America…” | more…
