February 20, 2024
John Bellamy Foster will deliver the keynote speech, “Capitalist Crises, Ecology, and Socialism,” at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change, Social Change conference in Carlton South, Australia, on September 30th. He will be joined by Ian Angus and many others; the conference is organized by Green Left Weekly, Resistance, and the Socialist Alliance. Register today!
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
Join the author of Revolutionary Doctors for talks at the University of Maine in Farmington and Orono, and at the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine on November 3rd.
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
On this week’s episode of HFTF, scientist and writer Fred Magdoff discusses his brand new book (with John Bellamy Foster), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment.
February 20, 2024
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’.
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
“Pessimism of the Reality, Optimism of the Ideal,” is excerpted from José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, edited and translated by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, and newly published by Monthly Review Press. Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most profound and yet 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. He also stressed that indigenous peoples must take an active role in any revolutionary struggle.
