As Baltimore schoolteachers and students return to their classrooms later this month, the enduring tale of America as a land of opportunity will resound again with great fervor. All good teachers will weave into their lesson plans a narrative of hope: If you do this drill on the board, keep your uniform neat, complete your homework, follow the curriculum, make the grade—above all, matriculate upward—you can change your condition, overcome economic insecurity, and procure a spot in America’s bounteous middle class or beyond. | more…

In a post-9/11 world, a “new normal” exists in the US. It tilts in no small way towards the power of government’s three branches. The trio focuses, almost obsessively, on national safety and security. Against that backdrop, Albert Ruben’s new book amplifies the strengths and weaknesses of a progressive institution involved in civil liberties and human rights struggles for nearly five decades. | more…

Our friends at Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal have posted an excerpt from What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster. | more…

Steve Brouwer identifies his physician father as the only socialist he knew growing up. The elder Brouwer listened to patients, and he was incensed if they stayed away because of no money. Such early awareness evidently prepared the way for the author’s remarkable book “Revolutionary Doctors.” Brouwer traces the evolution of Cuba’s health system that has led to Cuban-Venezuelan collaboration in providing health care for their people and medical assistance throughout the world. | more…

It’s no secret that this country has an education problem. Whether pre-K or post-grad, the consensus is clear: we need more and better education. Too few students make it through high school, and fewer still make it through college; in any case they are not learning enough, or they are not learning the right things in the right way. The child left behind in school will never go to college, and the child who doesn’t go to college becomes the adult who will never attain a reasonably well-paying job. Education, then, is the key to prosperity — for individual workers and for the nation that comprises them. But wait. | more…

The fortunes of Antonio Gramsci as a Marxist thinker and Communist Party leader have been so curious it is worth foregrounding their recent past within academic and intellectual circles. Particularly in the English-speaking world, Gramsci’s popularity has undoubtedly only increased since the fall of the Soviet bloc, the advance of neoliberalism and the deeper disorganization of the Left. Such a phenomenon leaves us asking why it is that this Marxist revolutionary has been spared the same fate as Marx and Engels, who either have continued to be held in disrepute or, worse, been relegated to irrelevance. | more…

Our friends at Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal have posted an excerpt from Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care by Steve Brouwer. | more…

Just released! Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community health care, designed to serve—and largely carried out by—the poor themselves. Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela’s Integral Community Medicine program, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. Such programs were first developed in Cuba, and Cuban medical personnel play a key role in Venezuela today as advisors and organizers. This internationalist model has been a great success—Cuba is a world leader in medicine and medical training—and Brouwer shows how the Venezuelans are now, with the aid of their Cuban counterparts, following suit. | more…

VIDEO: The author of The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, gave the following lecture, “Sex, Lies, and Economics: The Amazing Story and Relevance of Economics and Economists Before Adam Smith” at the Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, on June 25, 2011. | more…

Socialist historian and novelist John Tully’s well-researched history of rubber shines a spotlight on a material most of us take for granted. The result is an accessible, well-written and absorbing account of rubber’s blood-soaked history, from the plunder of the Amazon and the Congo basin to slave labour in Nazi work camps. At first glance, a 360-page book on a single commodity might put off a potential reader. However it soon becomes clear why rubber is such a worthy subject. An essential commodity in the development of industrial capitalism, the drive to acquire rubber was central to European imperialism – with its catastrophic effects for indigenous populations. | more…

The first twenty years of the twentieth century were decades of revolution that set the terms of world politics perhaps for the rest of the century. The most familiar events would be the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but others of world importance include the Chinese revolution of 1911, and the German revolution of 1918-19. To these should be added Mexico’s revolution that began in 1910. | more…