Category: Monthly Review Press /

Revolutionary Doctors reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

I live in California, where a fledgling public health insurance marketplace is ushering a new gold rush of sorts. A driving force is of course President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Under such reform, capital cheers when the commodity of health care grows. A different kind of health-care system concerns author Steve Brouwer. In Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World's Conception of Health Care, he details that alternate way ahead for medicine and people to improve social equity and solidarity. It's moving ahead now in Latin America. Brouwer's book teems with his first-hand accounts from a village in Monte Carmelo. His focus amplifies the model of de-commoditized health care that rules the roost stateside.

The Endless Crisis discussed in the Guardian

February 20, 2024

Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian, sums it up: "The Marxist perspective, exemplified in a new book by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, is also useful. This argues that the strong western growth rates in the middle of the 20th century were something of a mirage, caused by high military spending, postwar reconstruction, higher welfare spending and the investment in road networks that allowed the full flowering of the age of the automobile. Since then, a number of things have happened. There has been a concentration of capital but a shortage of profitable investment opportunities. So far, there has not been a wave of innovations like the car, the plane, cinema and TV to give the global economy a shot in the arm, although it is possible that digital, robotics, genetics and green technology could act as a catalyst. The result has been a declining trend rate of growth, and the increased financialisation of western economies as the surpluses have been re-cycled through the banks in a search for yield. Hence the Latin American debt crisis. Hence the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Hence the inability of the global economy to emerge from its torpor."

Wisconsin Uprising reviewed in Against the Current

February 20, 2024

MORE THAN A year has passed since the mass protests of February-March 2011, at Madison and elsewhere across Wisconsin, erupted in response to Republican Governor Scott Walker's effort to bust the state's public employee unions. The three-week occupation of the State Capitol building and truly massive outdoor demos in the surrounding streets drew the attention of the entire country and much of the world. Ongoing rallies, with crowds sometimes numbering well over a hundred thousand, drew organized labor and the unorganized, private and public sector workers, high school and college kids, farmers, the elderly and the young, retirees, the unemployed and recently returned veterans, and whole families with kids and grandkids — from every city, town and county in the state.

Mészáros discussion in Boston

February 20, 2024

Join Irving Kurki and Doug Enaa Greene for an installment of the ongoing "Occupy Consciousness" lecture series, where they discuss the work of István Mészáros and its application to our time and the Occupy Movement.

Occupy Consciousness: a video lecture on the work of István Mészáros

February 20, 2024

These videos were recorded at a lecture on May 19, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They feature Irv Kurki, coordinator for essential discussions of advanced theory, discussing "Capital's (Dis)organizing Systems and the Socialist Alternatives"; and Doug Enaa Greene, member of the Kasama Project and an activist at Occupy Boston, on "Critiquing Capital from Capital's Viewpoint: Meszaros's Critique of Sartre and the Occupy Movement."

Jeb Sprague's Op-Ed in the Miami Herald

February 20, 2024

Haiti's government is making plans to revive the country's disbanded army, an institution guilty of many of the worst crimes ever perpetrated in the country. At the same time, special police units have been used to drive earthquake victims out of camps. While civil society and grassroots organizations in Haiti are campaigning against a return to the era of Duvalierist repression, people in the United States should be made aware of our government's long history with that country's military and security forces.

MR Panels at the Left Forum, NYC

February 20, 2024

A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world.

Mexico's Revolution Then and Now reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

In Mexico's Revolution Then and Now (Monthly Review, paperback, 2010), James D. Cockcroft provides a window to the past and present of the US neighbor. A speaker of English and Spanish, Cockcroft is also a prolific author of books on Mexico, with over a half-century of experience and study there. His new book published a century after the Mexican Revolution arrives at a crucial time, as pundits and politicians "talk loud and say nothing" about the struggles of common people in Mexico.

Social Structure & Forms of Consciousness Vol. II reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

The central aspect of Mészáros' argument is the impossibility of understanding structure except through history. Furthermore, the denial of history (which is more or less explicit in structuralism and its progeny) is the necessary result of a failure to understand the dialectic of structure and history. Associated with this problem are a whole range of issues, first of all of course, the use of the Marxist concept of base and superstructure. There are also such matters as the relationship between individual and society, as exemplified, in a problematic sense, in Jean-Paul Sartre's attempts to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. While both Sartre's and Lévi-Strauss' work is seen ultimately in terms of failure, Sartre is regarded with considerable respect. In contrast, Mészáros has little patience with Lévi-Strauss, for whom history in itself was a problem.

Class Dismissed reviewed in CHOICE

February 20, 2024

Writing as en engaged public intellectual, Marsh (English, Pennsylvania State Univ.) argues that education, from preschool through graduate school, should not be viewed as a panacea for America's economic and social ills. Instead, he calls for a drastic decrease in poverty and inequality as a more potent elixir. Marsh marshals ample historical and empirical evidence to bolster his case.