Monthly Review Press

Crafting a revolutionary healthcare system–NACLA reviews 2 books on Cuban Health Care

February 20, 2024

The Right to Live in Health and Cuban Health Care, when read together, historicize Cuba’s pathbreaking medical system. ... While observers often focus on Cuba’s health infrastructure and policies, Rodríguez and Fitz instead emphasize consciousness and ideology. These two books show that throughout the twentieth century, Cubans voiced new demands and prioritized specific values, and, as a result, crafted a revolutionary healthcare system...

“Colossal intellectual undertaking”: Irish Marxist Review on John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature”

February 20, 2024

"John Bellamy Foster is a U.S.-based writer and lecturer whose works are essential reading for all revolutionaries and environmentalists. Over two decades, Foster has produced an immensely important body of work, and alongside a small number of others (like Ian Angus), has clarified and rescued Marxist thinking on key environmental issues in the age of climate catastrophe..."

New! “Crisis and Predation: India, COVID-19, and Global Finance”

February 20, 2024

With the advent of COVID-19, India’s rulers imposed the world’s most stringent lockdown on an already depressed economy, dealing a body blow to the majority of India’s billion-plus population. Yet the Indian government’s spending to cushion the lockdown’s economic impact ranked among the world’s lowest in GDP terms, resulting in unprecedented unemployment and hardship. Crisis and Predation shows how this tight-fistedness stems from the opposition of global financial interests to any expansion of public spending by India, and that Indian rulers readily adhere to their guidance...

The Thanksgiving Afterthoughts of Gerald Horne, via The Socialist Program w/Brian Becker

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, author of several books, including The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talked a few days ago to Brian Becker, host of The Socialist Program, about the story of the creation of Thanksgiving. This isn the first installment of an ongoing series where The Socialist Program examines the real origins of U.S. society...

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....

“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....

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...

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...

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...."