Monthly Review Press

Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature–John Bellamy Foster via Cosmonaut

February 20, 2024

“The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary. Join Niko, Ian, Matthew, and Remi as they discuss the context of this work, and how it started a rediscovery of Marx’s ecological politics. They discuss how ecology informed Marx’s understanding of the world since his doctoral thesis, the relationship between Marx, Darwin, and Malthus and the concept of metabolic rift.”

New! Cuban “Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution”

February 20, 2024

Quiet as it’s kept inside the United States, the Cuban revolution has achieved some phenomenal goals, reclaiming Cuba’s agriculture, advancing its literacy rate to nearly 100 percent—and remaking its medical system. Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost. In Cuban Health Care, Don Fitz combines his broad knowledge of Cuban history with his decades of on-the-ground experience in Cuba to bring us the story of how Cuba’s health care system evolved and how Cuba is tackling the daunting challenges to its revolution in this century....

Gerald Horne back on Diaspora Music, via Black Power 96 Radio…

February 20, 2024

Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne talks with host Norman “Otis” Richmond (aka Jalal) about a wide range of current topics, and his most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. The book is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed...

Science & Society reviews two books by the late Samir Amin: “The Long Revolution” & “Only People Make Their Own History”

February 20, 2024

The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International
By Samir Amin, reviewed by Molly Giedel
Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution
By Samir Amin, reviewed by Chris Vials

THIS IS HELL! Brings you “Apocalypse dawning: Slavery & capital across the transatlantic 16th century”

February 20, 2024

Chuck Mertz, host of This Is Hell (broadcast across Chicago on WNUR since 1996), talks with historian Gerald Horne about his latest book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Horne explores the terrains of race, religion, capital and slavery across the 16th century trans-Atlantic world. As European powers pillaged Africa and the Americas of people and resources, their destruction created the enduring formations of life in the 21st century--white supremacy and rapacious capitalism...

The War on Black Dissent, Part I: Black Lives, Red Scares featuring Gerald Horne

February 20, 2024

Chip Gibbons, host of the podcast Still Spying | Presented by Defending Rights & Dissent interviews author and historian Gerald Horne about Black Lives/Red Scares: the history of the FBI's war on Black dissent. This is part I of a multi-episode series. Listen, below, or at Still Spying

“Monumental”: Le Monde diplomatique on John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature”

February 20, 2024

Editor of Monthly Review and one of the main thinkers of the North American ecological left, John Bellamy Foster offers in this monumental book a fascinating genealogy of ecosocialism, via a synthesis of scientific and artistic critiques of capitalism, developed in United Kingdom between the end of the 19th century and the 1960s....

Marx indeed lives, Saito says–but whose Marx? Houston Review on “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism”

February 20, 2024

Every revolutionary struggle must fight not just for the future but also for the past. Marx’s work has been foreclosed by its detractors as backwards and naive; if Walter Benjamin was right that even the dead shall not be safe if the enemy is victorious, then Marxists today must accept their defeat.... However, what is always obscured in this move to foreclose the past is the dynamism and constant change in Marx’s thought and the scope of his life’s work.... Just as Juliet Mitchell returned to Freud to correct and expand feminist analysis of patriarchy and psychic development for women, ecosocialists have increasingly returned to Marx to carve out a new path to the future by returning to the past....

Gerald Horne on “Who Belongs?” podcast: EP 28 – Settler colonialism, the insurrections of the 1960s, and today

February 20, 2024

Listen to Professor Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse, talk with Marc Abizeid and Erfan Morandi, hosts of the podcast Who Belongs? A Podcast on Othering & Belonging. Professor Horne has written on a spectrum of issues and events including the early settler colonial period of the US, the Haitian and Mexican revolutions, labor politics, civil rights, profiles of WEB Du Bois and revolutionary artist Paul Robeson, to name just a few. The interview focuses on the uprisings of the 1960s, structural racism, and the transformative currents of today. Listen, below, or at Who Belongs?/SoundCloud

Via The Intercept: Gerald Horne on the Revolutionary Life of Paul Robeson, Antifascist Singer, Artist, & Rebel

February 20, 2024

Jeremy Scahill, host of Intercepted, a podcast series sponsored by The Intercept, looks to the life of artist and communist thinker Paul Robeson, as a lodestar to guide us through these crisis times. Robeson's lifelong devotion to empowering workers and overthrowing fascists around the world was connected to the liberation of Black people in the United States. Professor Gerald Horne, author of Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary and, more recently, The Dawning of the Apocalypse joins Scahill to help elucidate Robeson's vision and radical contributions...