Cuban Urban Agriculture as a Strategy for Food Sovereignty
Review of Sinan Koont, Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), 208 pages, $74.95, hardback.
Examining the Bases of Power, Inequality, and Human Variation
Review of Agustín Fuentes, Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 274 pages, $27.50, hardback.
Notes on a Life in Struggle
Review of David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 352 pages, $22, paperback.
February 2013 (Volume 64, Number 9)
For a long time now orthodox economics has been hindered by its extreme irrealism—a refusal even to attempt a realistic theoretical understanding of how modern capitalism functions. The shift to using fanciful assumptions to explore largely minor issues, following a brief Keynesian moment in the post-Second World War era, has been in many ways self-reinforcing. Once fundamental characteristics of the capitalist economy such as labor exploitation, accumulation, built-in inequality, monopoly power, rent-seeking behavior, technological change, and the tendency to stagnation were removed from the analysis—as a result of an ideological process of system-rationalization—there was little recourse but to fall back in successive stages on more and more abstract models based on increasingly purified notions of individual rationality.… Nevertheless, the deepening crisis of today’s monopoly-finance capital has given rise to a new era of questioning within the economics profession, and some top-tier neoclassical economists are now struggling—though hindered at every step by their own training and inclinations—to recapture knowledge long abandoned. | more…
James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy
The world at present is fast approaching a climate cliff. Science tells us that an increase in global average temperature of 2°C (3.6° F) constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change, leading to irreversible changes beyond human control. A 2°C rise is sufficient to melt a significant portion of the world’s ice due to feedbacks that will hasten the melting. It will thus set the course to an ice-free world. Sea level will rise. Numerous islands will be threatened along with coastal regions throughout the globe. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms, floods) will be far more common. The paleoclimatic record shows that an increase in global average temperature of several degrees means that 50 percent or more of all species—plants and animals—will be driven to extinction. Global food crops will be negatively affected. | more…
Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution
Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire. My wonder at the life of Celia Sánchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sánchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name. | more…
The Migration and Labor Question Today: Imperialism, Unequal Development, and Forced Migration
It is impossible to disentangle the migration and labor question today without a deep understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism, namely, neoliberal globalization. One of the main features of the new global architecture…is the assault on the labor and living conditions of the majority of the global working class, and in particular the migrant workforce, which is among the most vulnerable segments of this class. This essay will analyze some key aspects of the system that contemporary migration is embedded in, with emphasis on the process of segmentation and the growing precariousness (precarization) of labor markets worldwide. | more…
The First Weapon of Mass Destruction
When the real estate market was building momentum during the 2000s, [new types of restructured, risk-based financial instruments] looked like a free lunch and insurers could pocket the insurance premium without ever being called in to make up for losses. However, when the market reversed in 2006, the payday came: some insurers lost heavily, others went bust, and a few, such as AIG, were bailed out. … By the end of the cycle, we had learned about the pro-cyclical nature of ratings-based structured products and the dangers of the new food chain. Hedge fund manager George Soros called Credit Default Swaps “weapons of mass destruction.” We had, many believed, been defeated by novelty. Or had we? Many think that subprime products are new, and that the use of ratings to structure financial instruments and so-called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are a recent invention permitted by advances in modern finance. They ought to study the history of Levy Maybaum, a man who lived in New Jersey in the late nineteenth century and invented the first CDS. | more…
Paramilitaries in Haiti
His right eye blinked furiously, swollen and red; he continued to rub it…. Louis-Jodel Chamblain, the man sitting across from me, had been a commander of the paramilitary force…known as the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti—also known as the Front for the National Liberation and Reconstruction of Haiti, or FLRN…. He was also a cofounder in the mid–1990s of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) death squads. According to Human Rights Watch, the FRAPH took part in the killing of at least 4,000 people as well as in thousands of rapes and other acts of torture. Before cofounding the FRAPH, Chamblain had served with the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous paramilitary arm of the Duvalier dictatorship, which according to human rights organizations was responsible for killing tens of thousands of people and victimizing many more. | more…
Cuba: The New Global Medicine
Cuba is remaking medicine in a remarkable diversity of cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Its efforts go far beyond providing medical care to other parts of the world as a Western approach might limit itself to doing. The Cuban project develops bilateral agreements with host countries to rethink, redesign, and recreate medicine. | more…
Medicine and Empire
Howard Waitzkin, Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 256 pages, $25, paperback.
For the past three decades Howard Waitzkin has been (along with Vicente Navarro) the leading social medicine theorist in the United States. Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire provides a superb sampling of Waitzkin’s wide-ranging work, and a readily accessible introduction to the searching insights offered by a Marxist view of medicine. | more…
Who Killed Che?
How the CIA Got Away With Murder
Ratner and Smith have done it again! Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder is their second bombshell book dealing with Che Guevara and the U.S. government’s frequent use of illegal and criminal political assassinations and routine whopper lies in its foreign policy, all in the name of “defending freedom”…. In their new Che book these two prominent civil liberties lawyers present forty-four previously classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to show—quite meticulously and colorfully, as if in a courtroom drama—how the CIA, in concert with the White House, masterminded the murder of Che and then tried to cover it up.… For some readers this may seem like an old story, since the U.S. government now openly proclaims the legitimacy of assassinating foreign leaders and even U.S. citizens during its hypocritical “war on terrorism.”… But as Che himself once said in words that Libya’s murdered leader Muammar Qaddafi might have done well to heed, “You cannot trust imperialism, not even a little bit, not in anything.” And there, indeed, is the rub. | more…