Category: Monthly Review Press /

Revolutionary Doctors reviewed by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

February 20, 2024

Each of us read Steve Brouwer's Revolutionary Doctors (MR Press, 2011) the same week the media reported average gross fee-for-service earnings of Manitoba doctors at $298,119. The media also reported, again, that many Canadians do not have access to a family doctor; that some specialists are in short supply; and that health conditions in many Aboriginal communities are appalling. While we are fervent supporters of Canada's Medicare system, we think there is much to be learned about health care from Brouwer's book.

Read Michael Yates's afterword to Wisconsin Uprising on CounterPunch

February 20, 2024

The most important thing that has taken place since Wisconsin is another uprising, the phenomenal Occupy Wall Street (OWS). It began in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park in September 2011 and spread rapidly to more than 2,600 towns and cities around the world. With OWS, the anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich that has been bubbling under the surface for the past several years has finally burst into the open. Suddenly, everything seems different, and a political opening for more radical thinking and acting is certainly at hand.

Revolutionary Doctors reviewed on A World to Win

February 20, 2024

Of the many statistics in Steve Brouwer's book, Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba are changing the World's Conception of Health Care, one in particular stands out. There are more students, about 73,000, in medical school in Cuba and Venezuela, with a combined population of 39 million people, than there are in the whole of the US with a population of 300 million. And they are all educated and trained for free. Many of them will go to Bolivia, Haiti and other countries in order to "to serve the poor, heal the afflicted and make a better world".

75 Years after the Death of Christopher Caudwell

February 20, 2024

On February 12, 1937, Christopher Caudwell, a Marxist scholar and revolutionary, was killed by fascists in the valley of Jarama during the Spanish Civil War. He died at a machine gun post, guarding the retreat of his comrades in the British Battalion of the International Brigade. He was 29.

The Rise of the Tea Party reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Anthony DiMaggio is a social justice activist who has written a timely book on the myths and realities of the Tea Party, with its ties to corporate and GOP interests, and sheen of a grassroots social movement. He disentangles big money and media errors of fact in The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama (Monthly Review Press). DiMaggio carefully looks at the reporting on the Tea Party and flawed assumptions. They yield mistaken conclusions.

John Bellamy Foster in Australia, Sept. 30

John Bellamy Foster in Australia, Sept. 30

February 20, 2024

John Bellamy Foster will deliver the keynote speech, "Capitalist Crises, Ecology, and Socialism," at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change, Social Change conference in Carlton South, Australia, on September 30th. He will be joined by Ian Angus and many others; the conference is organized by Green Left Weekly, Resistance, and the Socialist Alliance. Register today!

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

That capitalism is not a rewarding or healthy system for the vast majority of workers may not come as news to most of us, but as Perelman points out in this interesting book, such understanding has never been part of mainstream economics. Following Adam Smith, capitalist economics has concentrated on transactions – the operation of the market – to the exclusion of production, and therefore of the conditions under which production happens. The result, Perelman argues, is not just appalling conditions for workers but, in capitalist terms an even worse consequence, the diminution of profits.

Steve Brouwer in Maine, November 2 & 3

February 20, 2024

Join the author of Revolutionary Doctors for talks at the University of Maine in Farmington and Orono, and at the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine on November 3rd.

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism reviewed in Links

February 20, 2024

Resolving the ecological crisis is incompatible with capitalism. We must build a movement that works against capitalist logic with the aim to overcoming it in favour of a properly sustainable and egalitarian form of society. This is the contention persuasively presented by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster in their recently published book What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism.

Revolutionary Doctors reviewed on Upside Down World

February 20, 2024

Modelled on Che Guevara's principles and keeping in line with the Cuban revolution, Steve Brouwer's assessment of Cuba's health care system in his book Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World's Conception of Health Care (Monthly Review Press, July 2011) stands as a testimony to answer anyone claiming that socialism cannot function. Cuban doctors have regaled people in Latin America and around the world with medical opportunities which, in capitalist ideology and implementation, remain remote.

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