The Occupy Wall Street movement arose in response to the economic crisis of capitalism, and the way in which the costs of this were imposed on the 99 percent rather than the 1 percent. But “the highest expression of the capitalist threat,” as Naomi Klein has said, is its destruction of the planetary environment. So it is imperative that we critique that as well. I would like to start by pointing to the seriousness of our current environmental problem and then turn to the question of how this relates to capitalism. Only then will we be in a position to talk realistically about what we need to do to stave off or lessen catastrophe. | more…

Why do we continue with business as usual when we know that it is leading us to disastrous climate change? According to the authors of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth it is because our capitalist economic system is driven by forces which cannot stand back and weigh the consequences of their drive. The blind accumulation of private wealth at the expense of the environment has enormous momentum which the system is not geared to control. | more…

The Occupy Wall Street movement has transfixed the nation. In just a few weeks, it has spread from Manhattan to hundreds of towns and cities, and it has now taken root in other countries. It has focused the widespread anger that we feel toward a tiny group of extraordinarily rich individuals (the 1%) who have destroyed our communities, eliminated our jobs, taken control of our government, and done everything they can to make us (the 99%) as insecure as possible. Whatever we have, they want. Whatever we aspire to, they would deny us. | more…

Join Frank Bardacke, author of Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (from Verso Books), and translator of and contributor to Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, for a discussion of his new book.  | more…

The People’s Lawyer is Albert Ruben’s neatly condensed history of the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The CCR was founded in 1966 with a goal of ‘advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. What marks it out from other civil rights legal firms established in the sixties was its commitment to using politically motivated cases as an organising tool within the wider social movements. Cases may not end in victory for the CCR but they could play a key role in educating the public in ‘the creative use of law as a positive force for social change’. | more…

We are here as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a few short weeks has become a global movement in hundreds of cities around the world. We are part of the 99 percent not only in this country but the world. I have been reading the mainstream, corporate media. I have been listening to the pundits, the power brokers, the politicians. They criticize our movement, saying we don’t really know why we are here. They are wrong. We are part of the growing army of the Occupy Wall Street movement worldwide. And we know why we are here. | more…

This much is true. Americans with bachelor’s degrees and up earn higher pay than high school grads. Yet a third of the future jobs statewide created in the next 10 years, will require, at most, no more than a 12th-grade education. Meanwhile, US income inequality and poverty has been rising over the past three decades. Why has and does education bear the burden that it does for what ails the nation’s populace? | more…

José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most profound but overlooked thinkers. A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin America. This volume collects his essential writings, including many that have never been translated and some that have never been published.  | more…

A few months ago, it looked like the Great Recession was over and the economy on its way to full recovery. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury had bailed out the nation’s financial sector and engaged in enough deficit spending to stop the dramatic rise in unemployment. The major European economies were holding their own, and the rising BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies seemed to be taking up any global slack in consumer demand and capital investment. Gross domestic product (GDP) here and in many other nations had stopped falling and started rising, sometimes dramatically.  | more…

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. | more…

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. | more…