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…

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger celebrated his Papal inaugural mass in 2005 it’s reasonable to assume he didn’t expect in the course of his reign to be facing charges in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. If the Center for Constitutional Rights prevails, that is precisely what awaits him. | more…

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. | more…

John Marsh discusses his new book, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality. Marsh’s study asks some uncomfortable questions about the limits of education as a tool for eliminating inequality and poverty in the United States. On the show, he discusses how over the course of American history, but especially since World War II, education has became increasingly viewed as the central method for reducing poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, other remedies, including redistribution through higher wages or social programs, have been pushed to the margins of political thought. | more…

On Tuesday, June 14, the Guardian of London published “Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers.” In this nearly 1,100-word commentary, the British writer George Monbiot attacked the two of us (among others) as “genocide deniers” and “revisionists” for our writings on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Monbiot also went on to assail Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and the U.K.-based Media Lens group for their association with individuals as depraved as we are. | more…

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in exploring issues of ecology and sustainability from a Marxist perspective. Partially inspired by the ecological movement more widely, partially by the revival of Marxist economic theory since the 1980s, the topic of ‘Marx and ecology’ has been given wide attention in a range of publications in recent years. All three of the authors of the present book have earned their stripes in this field of research, and in particular John Bellamy Foster has been influential in putting ecological questions on the agenda of socialist politics, a tradition that had hitherto often been hostile to the claims of (middle class) ‘green’ campaigners. | more…