February 20, 2024
Jaisal Noor of The Real News Network turns to Monthly Review Press author, Gerald Horne (Confronting Black Jacobins; The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism), for Horne’s historical perspective on Trump’s tweets and the National Rifle Association’s recent recruitment video
February 20, 2024
The leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, 1922-1991) used the terms ‘real socialism’ and ‘actually existing socialism’ to ‘distinguish their real experience from merely theoretical socialist ideas.’ Lebowitz asks how that system actually functioned, how it reproduced itself, and why it ‘yield[ed] to capitalism without resistance from the working classes who were presumably its beneficiaries’. (p. 7) ¶ Interesting questions. Especially to those of us who want to construct a more humane system than the capitalism that defeated the USSR….
February 20, 2024
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is heard, along with other scientists, on CBCradio‘s ‘The 180 with Jim Brown,’ considering the question: Why do we name diseases the way we do?
February 20, 2024
In his introduction to Educational Justice, Howard Ryan states that he and his coauthors ‘offer theory, strategy and organizing case studies to inform and inspire those who are working to rebuild public education and put an end to the corporate occupation of our schools.’ This is an apt description, and the reason anyone interested in that work should read this book. Ryan’s motivation for writing this ambitious book was his conviction ‘that the fight to defend public schools had particular potential for energizing larger movements for democracy and social justice.’
February 20, 2024
What happens to democracy when the president of the United States labels critical media outlets as ‘enemies of the people’ and disparages the search for truth with the blanket term ‘fake news’? What happens to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical thinking becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled by an economics of contempt that blames the poor for their condition and subjects them to a culture of shaming? … ¶ What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality….
February 20, 2024
Come to Central London, UK, to join organizers, intellectuals, and activists in a 4-day political festival of ideas, discussions, debates, art, films, and music! Speakers will include Ian Angus, author of "Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System"...
February 20, 2024
This new collection of essays from one of the world’s leading Marxist environmentalists is an important contribution to discussions about how we can fight for a sustainable world, one where, as Ian Angus says quoting Marx, we live as “a society of good ancestors”. More than this however the book is an important reassertion of how to approach questions of science and politics that strengthen our ability to understand the world and change it.
February 20, 2024
Is Trump a neofascist? Analysts on the left, such as Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism, calling him a “rightwing populist.” Does it really matter what Trump is called? The poet, playwright, and political thinker, Bertolt Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?” Hear Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith speak with John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, who wrote the review of the month, “This Is Not Populism” in the June 2017 issue.
February 20, 2024
So many put their puts hopes into Syriza; so many were bitterly disappointed. Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left proved wholly unable to resist the enormous pressures put on it and it is Greek working people who are paying the price, not excepting those who voted for Syriza. ¶ How should we analyze the depressing spectacle of what had been a genuinely Left party, indeed a coalition of leftist forces from a variety of socialist perspectives, self-destructing so rapidly? The simplistic response would be to wash our hands and condemn Syriza as “opportunists,” but we’ll learn exactly nothing with such an attitude...
February 20, 2024
On July 7, 2017, a group of the world’s biggest economic powers, known as the G20, met in Hamburg, Germany. What happened at the event? What kinds of realignments happened among governments? How did the U.S. emerge the meetings? Margaret Prescod of SojournerTruthradio/KPFK discussed this on July 11 with Gerald Horne, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of more than thirty books, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
