Monthly Review Press

Gerald Horne presides at “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” by Ishmael Reed

February 20, 2024

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...

Socialist Review on John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology”

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....

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...."

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....

“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...

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...

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...

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...

Snappy, absorbing, illuminative account of a life on the American & Irish Left: Logos reviews Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

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....