Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Gerald Horne with Charisse Burden-Stelly on the longue durée of apocalypse

February 20, 2024

Interviewer Charisse Burden-Stelly begins, “….apocalypse represented, for African and indigenous folks, the end of life as they knew it—that is, a life free from enslavement, genocide, and ongoing violence wrought by the insatiable drive of the group that came to be known as “whites” for endless profit. This ending was simultaneously the beginning of a capitalist world economy rooted in racial hierarchy, imperial domination, and militarized social relations, of which neoliberalism is merely the most recent enunciation.”

Read: Gerald Horne’s “Jazz and Justice” exposes music industry mobsters (Green Left)

Read: Gerald Horne’s “Jazz and Justice” exposes music industry mobsters (Green Left)

February 20, 2024

As a work of social history, Jazz and Justice traces the origins of Jazz in the northern part of this hemisphere, but the issues it raises are quite contemporary. As his reviewer notes, “the now-common expression ‘gig work’ originated in the jazz world. The near-endless list of Black jazz musicians who have died early deaths is testimony to the overwork the gig economy forced on them.”

Read: A deep review of Horne’s “Jazz and Justice” (Counterfire)

Read: A deep review of Horne’s “Jazz and Justice” (Counterfire)

February 20, 2024

“…from the world of Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory through to that of the Marsalis family, with the common thread being New Orleans, often cited as the birthplace of the music…an anatomy of resistance; at every stage, despite Jim Crow, gangsters and extreme violence, jazz developed and bloomed….”

Tigar on “Sensing Injustice” and almost every case imaginable (Listen: Law and Disorder)

Tigar on “Sensing Injustice” and almost every case imaginable (Listen: Law and Disorder)

February 20, 2024

If you want to hear more of the details and stories around the trials of the Chicago 8, Julian Assange, Lynne Stewart, Pinochet, and dozens more dramatic court cases with direct impacts on each of our daily lives, then it will be well worth your while to give your ear to Law and Disorder’s most recent conversation with Michael Tigar. Still, in his book Sensing Injustice, Tigar goes well beyond merely, if magnificently, narrating a profound array of legal battles. Tigar well understands the limits of law in the fight for justice, and of the role of the lawyer — as do his fellow lawyers Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith —and challenging existential questions about the nature of the legal profession also come up in the Law and Disorder interview.

“Voices of Latin America,” post–pink tide (Science & Society)

“Voices of Latin America,” post–pink tide (Science & Society)

February 20, 2024

“….almost half the book comes in the form of substantive interviews that are not simply rich and compelling in the sense of capturing the struggles and experiences of a diverse range of Latin Americans. They are also incredibly smart. The researchers interviewed some really sharp, experienced activists who have clearly thought deeply about political struggle for some time.”

“A Poisonous Legacy New York City and the persistence of the Middle Passage”–Gerald Horne in The Nation

“A Poisonous Legacy New York City and the persistence of the Middle Passage”–Gerald Horne in The Nation

February 20, 2024

“In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be ‘laid together spoon-fashion.’”

Extraordinary Achievements: Don Fitz’ “Cuban Health Care”

Extraordinary Achievements: Don Fitz’ “Cuban Health Care”

February 20, 2024

Comparing the health systems of Cuba and the United States, Don Fitz’ book “Cuban Health Care” presents a startling statistic: The cost of healthcare per person in Cuba is one twentieth that of the US. “Why?” Peter Arkell asks, and Fitz answers: “Poor countries simply cannot afford such an inefficient health system”…

Patnaik on Neoliberalism to Neofascism (Listen: Alternative Radio)

Patnaik on Neoliberalism to Neofascism (Listen: Alternative Radio)

February 20, 2024

From Modi’s India to Erdogan’s Turkey neofascist autocratic regimes have taken hold…The result: widespread immiseration and discontent. In its wake, demagogues exploit the situation. They are coming to power by scapegoating, instigating violence against minorities, coupled with loud calls for ‘getting our country back,’ and lots of flag waving…

Reason for common cause: A review of “The Robbery of Nature,” from Against the Current

Reason for common cause: A review of “The Robbery of Nature,” from Against the Current

February 20, 2024

“Foster and Clark show that the exploitation of wage labor in the capitalist production process is essentially tied to the expropriation of the natural world, the refusal to socially acknowledge care labor as socially necessary labor, the privatization of our common cultural heritage, the treatment of non-white communities as places where the social pathologies of capitalism (unemployment, poverty, and so on) can be concentrated, and so on. From this perspective workers, environmentalists, feminists, community activists, and anti-racists have good reason to make common cause.”

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