February 20, 2024
New Year’s Eve 2019: 5,000 people on the beach at Mallacoota, Victoria, watch pitch-black skies turn a deep red as the bushfire approaches. They huddle, powerless against the fury of this climate change-fuelled nightmare. By March 2020, 33 people, one billion animals, 3,094 houses and over 17 million hectares of land had been destroyed in fires across Australia…
February 20, 2024
“History continuously reminds us that racism and capitalism are two peas from the same pod. Those of a predominantly European descent wreak worldwide havoc, carrying out the much-fabled white man’s burden, imposing themselves as ruling elites. Black lives still don’t matter in many societies because the miserable claim of ‘white supremacy’ has been effortlessly intertwined with the neoreligion; capitalism….”
February 20, 2024
Historians Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century and Nikki Taylor, author, most recently, of Driven Towards Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and the Tragedy on the Ohio, appeared last week on the first 36 minutes of The Real New Network’s new Marc Steiner Show. They talked about the history of–and resistance to–fascist violence against Indigenous and Black communities in the US…
February 20, 2024
Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog. In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London gravesite—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….”
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….
