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. | more…

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.  | more…

With The Devil’s Milk, John Tully has produced a significant work that demands wide readership, consideration, and debate. Documenting capitalist hell, Tully serves as a captivating Virgil as he guides readers through rubber’s many layers. Dedicated to those who resisted and documented rubber’s atrocities, The Devil’s Milk serves as a forceful reminder that embedded within antagonism and conflict are multiple possibilities not only for the prolongation of this hell but also exit from it. | more…

Announcing a public lecture on the work of István Mészáros, in Boston, May 19, at the Harvest Co-operative in Cambridge. The presenters will offer their reflections on Mészáros’s latest work and relate that to the current situation. The presenters will contend that the American mind is stocked with the categories, symbols and rules of the 1 percent and that it is absolutely necessary to start discarding and restocking with the relevant structures of the 99 percent. | more…

Michael Lebowitz has drawn on the diverse experiences that led to the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere, and those in Venezuela where he has resided for nearly a decade, to bolster his thesis on the need to place the transformation of values at the center of socialist construction. In his emphasis on consciousness, Lebowitz follows the tradition of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsh and Che Guevara, while rejecting the determinist notion of the superstructure as an appendage of the structure lacking in autonomy.  | more…

In a debate that is often dominated by right wing creationists and reactionary neo-atheists, the authors manage to chart a different course. They succeed in showing how life has developed without needing to invoke supernatural forces. At the same time they sensitively discuss how materialist ideas have developed over the last several thousand years in a way which allows the reader to appreciate how radical and powerful such ideas can be. | more…

Watch videos of a lecture on the work of István Mészáros, presented on March 10th, 2012 in the Community Room at the Harvest Co-operative in Cambridge, MA. The presenters offered their reflections on István Mészáros’s latest work and related it to the current situation, contending that the American mind is stocked with the categories, symbols, and rules of the 1 percent and that it is absolutely necessary to start discarding and restocking with the relevant structures of the 99 percent. Speakers: Doug Enaa Greene, a member of the Kasama Project and an activist at Occupy Boston; Irv Kurki, a coordinator for essential discussions of advanced theory; and Mario Rendon, American Institute of Psychoanalysis. | more…

Announcing upcoming events with Steve Brouwer, author of Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care, in Boston and Maine.  | more…

This book describes a new approach to medical education and practice that was originally developed in Cuba. This novel, Marxist approach to a worldwide problem is a striking example of the inventiveness of the Cubans to the development of socialism in their country. Socialists say that they want to replace the contemporary system of political economy, based on the profit motive, by one in which production and exchange are predicated on the necessary and sensible needs of the population. But a critical question is: how do we get from a capitalist system to a socialist system? This book describes relevant, empirical data derived from the Cuban experience of health assistance to their South American neighbours. | more…

Pity the US proletariat? Not author, editor and labor educator Michael D. Yates and fellow scribes in Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back (Monthly Review Press). In 16 essays, they lay out forceful portraits of last year’s political conflict in or that relate to the Badger State. | more…

When prices for many basic foods spiked in 2007 and 2008, thousands rioted in more than 30 countries from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso. In Haiti the riots drove President Réné Préval from office; in Egypt they were a key act in the prologue to the current revolution. It took the world’s intellectual establishment by surprise. By 2009 Scientific American was running articles with titles such as “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” After all, there can be few more serious failures of any social order than an inability to feed the population—as the Bolsheviks knew when they made the demand for “peace, bread and land” one of their main slogans in the Russian Revolution of 1917. This collection of essays is a serious attempt to theorise the crisis in the global food economy for the left. | more…