Steven Colatrella, has taught at Bard College and the New School, and has served as Chair of the Political and Social Sciences Department at John Cabot University in Rome, and as President of the Iowa Sociological Association. He is the author of Workers of the World: African and Asian Migrants in Italy in the 1990s (2001) and has been a member of the Midnight Notes collective for 30 years. He lives in Padua, Italy.
<stevencolatrella@gmail.com>

Goran Marković is an associate professor of Constitutional Law at the University of East Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina). His Ph.D. is from the University of Belgrade. He is the author of Perspectives of Participatory Democracy (in Serbo-Croatian) and the forthcoming Federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a member of the International Institute for Self-Management and co-editor of Novi Plamen (The New Flame), regional leftist journal of social, political and economic issues, published in Zagreb (Croatia).
<goran.rkpbih@gmail.com>

Gavin Walker is a Mellon Graduate Fellow in Humanities at Cornell University. His recent publications include “Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt,” Rethinking Marxism (2011), and “Postcoloniality and the National Question in Marxist Historiography: … the Debate on Japanese Capitalism,” Interventions (2011). He is currently translating and editing the selected writings of Uno Kozo.
<gw57@cornell.edu>

Robert Weil has studied and supported revolutionary, national liberation and popular struggles in South and East Asia for the past half century. His undergraduate senior thesis was on Gandhi, Nehru and the communal conflict in India, and his article in this issue of S&D is based in part on a visit there during December 2009. He is the author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of “Market Socialism” (Monthly Review, 1996) and many papers on the Chinese working classes, political economy and social movements, and more recently comparisons and contrasts with their Indian counterparts. A lifelong activist in the struggles for civil rights, labor, anti-militarism, the environment and international solidarity, he is retired from teaching and union organizing at the University of California in Santa Cruz. <robweil@aol.com>

One approach embodied in some of the essays – to adapt a familiar dictum from Marx – is “ruthless criticism of all that exists [including all non-Marxist orientations in African American Studies] . . . in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at”; an alternative approach embodied in other essays is to seek common cause, rapprochement and areas of convergence in the various counter-hegemonic discourses of African American Studies.

The obvious differences serve to underscore the importance of the usual disclaimer accompanying such collections: that the views of the authors do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, or of each other.

While we acknowledge this divergence and while we recognize that a widely supported consensual position would do more to advance our common goal, we also believe that the array of sharply contrasting arguments that you will find here will prove to be not only stimulating in its own right, but also reflective of the actual state of the debate within the Black Left.

Better a frank accounting of our differences than a contrived unity. Despite all differences, however, we both remain committed, within the field of African American Studies, to the centrality of an anticapitalist critique.

– John H. McClendon III and Yusuf Nuruddin

In Memoriam
Manning Marable (1950-2011)
A Marxist Scholar of African American Studies

In The Ecological Revolution, John Bellamy Foster further develops his continuing project of a contemporary Marxist ecology that is definitively based in Marx the ecologist and resolutely committed to socialist revolution. Not confined to exegesis of the ecological and environmental content of the Marx-Engels corpus, this work is partly a continuation of Foster’s previous work in The Vulnerable Planet, Marx’s Ecology¸ and Ecology Against Capitalism, and partly a call to action and a green Marxist manifesto.

The book’s premise is that a major ecological collapse is possible, with survival of the human species thrown so severely into question that the relationship between humanity and the earth “is now either revolutionary or it is false” (7), and “an ecological revolution – a massive and sudden change in the relation of humanity to the earth – is necessary” (11). Foster distinguishes two basic responses to this crisis. One is the call for a new eco-industrial revolution, using advanced technological means and energy efficiency as the basis for a sustainable capitalism. The other is the much more radical eco-social revolution that Foster advocates. The latter approach, though also advocating alternative and energy-efficient technologies, ultimately envisages a process of sustainable human development, emphasizing “the need to transform the human relation to nature and the constitution of society at its roots” (12). It is a revolutionary approach that promotes a decisive break with the dominant logic of capital and the “economics of exterminism,” and calls for the restoration of a communally oriented human/nature metabolism that has been torn asunder by the unending accumulation of capital.

Following and expanding upon his seminal work in Marx’s Ecology, Foster’s ecological critique is derived from Marx’s observation that the material contradictions of capitalism arise from the organization of labor in possessive-individualist society. Anchoring his criticism explicitly in Marx’s own critique of capitalist political economy, Foster elaborates the three most ecologically prescient concepts taken from Marx and later Marxist writings that play a significant role in contemporary attempts to develop a radical Marxian ecology: 1) the treadmill of production; 2) the second contradiction of capitalism; and 3) the metabolic rift. The treadmill of production refers to the unceasing pursuit of profit and capital accumulation which results in an increasing and accelerating need for energy and materials at the expense of maintaining the regenerative capacity of the earth. But the second contradiction of capitalism and the metabolic rift occupy more of Foster’s present discussion.

Foster summarizes the second contradiction of capitalism noting that, “in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, [capitalism] …also undermines the human and natural conditions (i.e., environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimately rests…. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based on supply-side constraints on production” (48). Foster questions an overemphasis on the second contradiction, but he does not dismiss the issues it refers to. Rather, he emphasizes the concept of metabolism and metabolic rift present in Marx’s attention to ecological problems and in Marx’s focus on “the rational regulation of the metabolism of human society and nature (through the organization of human labor)” that is central to the building of a communist society (210).

Marx’s theory of metabolic rift was previously and extensively outlined in Marx’s Ecology, but is more thoroughly contextualized in The Ecological Revolution. The concept of social-ecological metabolism is central to Foster’s ecology and to Marx’s analysis of “capitalist ground rent” and “large-scale industry and agriculture.” Foster draws attention to Marx’s usage of “metabolism” to describe the human relation to nature through labor as a process where the human species acts, regulates, mediates, and controls the metabolism between nature and itself. This human/nature metabolism is a complex and interdependent process, and its balance is achieved through the rational organization of production and society in accordance with the basic conditions of sustainability. Marx’s critique connected the rift in this metabolism to the organization of capitalist production, and specifically to the issue of how large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture exploited (i.e., robbed) the soil of its nutrients just as it impoverished the worker.

Foster’s emphasis on the utility of Marx’s concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift is present throughout The Ecological Revolution. Their importance and explication are stressed to such a degree as to appear repetitive at times, particularly when accompanied by the requisite textual evidence from the first and third volumes of Capital. Editorial concerns aside, however, this meticulously crafted and compelling presentation reclaims metabolism and metabolic rift as conceptual tools of materialist dialectical analysis, empowering a clear perspective on human ecology that situates people as one organism among many carrying out an exchange of energy and matter with nature that is integrated with our own internal life processes, and clearly presenting nature and society not as diametrically opposed categories but as interdependent and co-evolutionary. We thus find an intimate connection between dialectical analysis and a materialist conception of nature, allowing for a Marxist ecology that links broad environmental awareness with critical political economy.

Where The Ecological Revolution differs from Foster’s previous works on Marxian ecology is in its concise application of elucidative theory to contemporary issues. The work is largely divided between an updated restatement of the ecological theory presented in Marx’s Ecology, and contemporary commentaries on specific topics such as peak oil, military planning to confront resource scarcity, the legacy of Rachel Carson, the continued failure of global environmental reforms, and eco-imperialism. In addition, Foster offers an informative critique of mainstream economists who favor either eco-industrial revolution or myopic acceptance with ad hoc adaptation to inevitable ecological catastrophe. Yet, the work is also framed as a manifesto of action that resoundingly calls for an eco-social and socialist revolution emphasizing sustainable human development and showing that in order to transcend alienation from nature one must also transcend social alienation. Foster thus holds that “ecological and socialist revolutions, if carried to their logical conclusions, are necessary and sufficient conditions of each other” (34).

The specifics of how to achieve a socialist eco-social revolution are necessarily and admittedly vague. Foster touches briefly upon steps taken in areas of the global South – including “the greening of Cuba,” Venezuela under Cha´vez and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, the embattled socialist current in Bolivia under Evo Morales, plus the regional model of Kerala (India) and the urban examples of Porto Alegre and Curitiba in Brazil – but he provides little in the way of explicit measures to initiate or further the revolutionary form so compellingly argued to be necessary for our survival. In the end, the reader is provided with a cogent analysis as well as a strong Marxian base for the furtherance of critical ecological political economy, but ultimately left still seeking concrete guidance on how to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable but urgent task.

2010 Noah Eber-Schmid
Rutgers University
neberschmid@polisci.rutgers.edu

To what extent may the election of Barack Obama to the highest political office in the United States have heralded the emergence of a new form of racism in America? Wise defines this variation of racism as “Racism 2.0” or “enlightened exceptionalism.” Whereas “Racism 1.0” was and is overt bigotry that traces its lineage to racist murders, lynching and verbal hatred – which occasionally reared its head during the run-up to the elections – Racism 2.0 is more covert, subtle and sophisticated. It is almost invisible in its existence and operation, but the effects remain the same: racial inequity and white privilege. Both types of racism prevailed during the 2008 presidential election. However, according to Wise “enlightened exceptionalism” among whites is based on the belief that Obama exemplifies the archetype of an exceptional and acceptable element of people of colour who have attained middle class (meaning white) values; who have “transcended” their blackness (by remaining silent on matters relating to race and racism); are articulate, suave and have bought into the American narrative that the US is a country of freedom and opportunity in which the needs of all can be met. In the words of Wise, “If large numbers of white folks embraced Obama, but only because of his ability to “transcend race,” by which we really mean transcend his own blackness, doesn’t this suggest the ongoing power of whiteness and racist thinking?” (86)

Those whites adhering to “Racism 2.0” believe Obama to be distinct from unacceptable black and brown people, i.e. those who remain on welfare, are idle, unemployed and unwilling to take responsibility for their lives. Obama too has exhorted black people to take on this personal responsibility and in doing so, Wise argues, has made whites “more comfortable with his candidacy” (72). Far from eliminating racism, “enlightened exceptionalism” absorbs and accommodates a minority of individuals of colour whilst simultaneously despising the masses of black and brown Americans. Such thinking reflects the chameleon-like nature of racism and its ability to change its shape in new contexts. Yet simultaneously, it is able to erect new barriers for people of colour who do not conform to the archetype of Obama, who Wise argues “has become the Cliff Huxtable of politics: a black man with whom millions of whites can identify and to whom they can relate, as with the former TV dad from The Cosby Show” (87).

Wise contends that whites fundamentally overlook the operation of “enlightened exceptionalism,” which is about accepting black people on white people’s terms; it is about black people having to pander to the perception of whites in an unchanged socio-economic system where whites still control the economic and political levers.

This small and eloquently written book is divided into two chapters. The first entitled “Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism” is the larger of the two and examines the meaning and impact of racism on the lives of black and brown people in the US today. Wise discusses the objective facts of continued racial disparities. He provides a wealth of statistical evidence to substantiate his argument that people of colour continue to confront racial discrimination in their income, jobs, housing, education, the criminal justice system, and healthcare. Those who were the victims of Hurricane Katrina were also victims of “the veritable ethnic cleansing that has marked the post-Katrina rebuilding process” (65). This section of the book demonstrates persuasively that racism continues in American society – from the huge prison-industrial complex (a majority of whose inmates are people of colour) to the polls from both whites and blacks who have very different perceptions of the reality of discrimination. For whites, racism either does not exist or is diminishing and people of colour are responsible for their own misfortunes. For people of colour, issues to do with race often permeate their very existence. Indifference to people of colour appears to be “the new face of racism in the twenty first century,” shown in how the Bush administration and the majority of white people viewed the victims of Katrina.

The “post-racial society” that the Wall Street Journal proclaimed the day after Obama’s victory is mythical if not a “definition of lunacy” (27). Wise observes that a parallel claim – that sexism had come to an end – would never have been made in Pakistan on the grounds that Benazir Bhutto had twice been elected prime minister (or in the US if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination). Yet, so many media pundits have been swift to claim that the systemic injustices of racism have been eradicated by the election of one person of colour. Such colossal denial allows white privilege to continue unchallenged. The 43% of whites who voted for Obama (more than any who voted for any white Democratic candidate since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, but less than many would like to think) may imagine that Obama’s victory signifies the demise of racism in America, but Wise shatters any such illusion.

Obama, in denouncing his former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, portrayed himself as belonging to a gentler, non-threatening cohort of black people. He extolled the greatness and goodness of America as he did in his first national speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Furthermore, he failed to critique the structures of American society, thereby devaluing the legitimate anger harboured by Wright and others.

In chapter two, “The Audacity of Truth: A Call for White Responsibility,” Wise poses a confrontational challenge to “white perspectivism.” He argues that white people must learn to listen and believe what people of colour say about racism because whites have for too long operated with the mindset that nothing exists unless white people first discover and experience it. He emphasizes that “the need for this level of honesty is no mere ethical matter. It is a matter of survival” (142). Living life in a bubble as the majority of white Americans do, will ill prepare them for trauma, which is what happened when 9/11 struck. It was predominantly whites who asked: “why do they hate us?” People of colour have often had to survive by knowing what others think about them and appropriately adapting their behaviour. Whites rarely see the world from the eyes of the other and need to be able to do so on the grounds of what he calls the tradition of “antiracist white allyship” (145). Such an alliance is necessary at this particular juncture when the campaign for Obama inspired a generation of young people – black, white, Latino and Asian – to become politically active and to vote. Yet, Wise warns that “voting is no panacea.” Moreover, he cautions that “hope is not audacious (in Obama’s terms) so much as it is dangerous” (112). The danger lies in failing to make Obama’s policies accountable to ordinary people rather than big business and forfeiting collective agency in the belief that the work has been done in electing a black messiah.

Wise has given us a brilliant and candid deconstruction of racism in the age of Obama. He writes with integrity, sincerity and commitment to genuine racial equality. His book should be read by all – particularly white people genuinely committed to anti-racism.

2010 Ama Biney
Birkbeck College, University of London
Ama.biney@yahoo.co.uk

In the epilogue of his new book on the historic 1968 student revolt at Columbia University, St. Louis University Professor of History and African American Studies Stefan Bradley notes that “although many of the participants have since passed on, the issues at Columbia seem to linger.” This was borne out in 2008 at a 40th anniversary event, when a Harlem Tenants Council activist denounced the Columbia administration’s current 17-acre campus expansion project in the neighborhood north of West 125th Street and passed out a flyer in which community residents vowed to stand against Columbia‘s “West Harlem eviction plan.”

Professor Bradley also observes that more than 40 years after the student revolt, some of the black students who participated in the nonviolent occupation of Hamilton Hall “bristle at the image of the Columbia demonstration that media sources often invoke” when they focus only on white students defying their parents by taking over buildings.

A key factor in the large mobilization of white students just a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination was the political alliance that had developed at Columbia between the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the black students who were most active in the campus chapter of the Student Afro-American Society (SAS). So a book like Professor Bradley’s, which focuses more on the role of the black students who occupied Hamilton Hall than on that of Mark Rudd and the white student demonstrators, is long overdue.

In examining the 1968 confrontation between the Harlem community (and its student supporters) and Columbia’s board of trustees, Bradley attempts to: 1) explain how it was possible for Columbia to take land and power from black people before 1968; 2) determine the effects of the confrontation method that the 1968–69 student protesters used; 3) explain why the black and white student protesters separated after Columbia’s Hamilton Hall was jointly seized by them; and 4) explain why Columbia eventually capitulated to some of the demands of the student demonstrators.

The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University explores Columbia’s historic relationship to Harlem’s people and land, while the second part examines the historic role students played in attempting to change Columbia’s institutional policies.

The first part includes an interesting history of the Harlem and Morningside Heights neighborhoods surrounding Columbia’s campus and explains why community resident opposition to Columbia developed. Bradley recalls that “there was only one full-time black faculty member at Columbia by the mid-1960s,” during which time 9,600 tenants, “approximately 85 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican,” were pushed out of the Morningside Heights and West Harlem apartment buildings or Single-Room Occupancy (SRO) residential hotels which Columbia University purchased and demolished or converted for its own institutional use.

Bradley next focuses more specifically on Columbia’s plan to build a gymnasium for its students in Harlem’s Morningside Park and the history of community protests against this project. We learn, for example, that in a January 29, 1966 editorial, Harlem’s African-American newspaper, the Amsterdam News, warned:

If Mayor Lindsay permits Columbia University to grab two acres of land out of Morningside Park for a gymnasium it will be a slap in the face to every black man, woman and child in Harlem…Columbia University, one of the richest institutions in the nation, only admits a handful of Negro scholars each year and its policies in dealing with Negroes in Harlem have been described as downright bigoted… Why then should the parents of Harlem give up their parkland to Columbia? What has Columbia done to merit such favoritism?

Thirty-one years earlier, W.E.B. Du Bois had written similarly in his classic 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America that “the Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro.”

By digging up flyers of various 1960s community groups and articles that appeared in various neighborhood newspapers, Bradley indicates that between April 1966 and March 1968 there were at least four community rallies against Columbia’s gym construction project and at least 25 arrests of anti-gym protesters. As Bradley observes:

After realizing that they would receive access to only 15 percent of the proposed structure that Columbia University would control, and be forced to use a different entrance, many black residents in the community saw that things were once more separate, but hardly equal…Instead of fighting against Jim Crow, the community now fought against Gym Crow…

In the second part of his book, Bradley relates the growth of the New Left and Black Power movements on US university campuses during the 1960s and describes the initially integrated protest effort of the black and white student demonstrators at Columbia on April 23, 1968, on campus and at the Morningside Park gym construction site as well as inside Hamilton Hall during the first few hours. He goes on to show how the black student protesters in Hamilton Hall won some concessions from the Columbia administration by aligning themselves with off-campus Black Liberation Movement groups and the Harlem community. He also provides a good description of what happened inside Hamilton Hall after the white student demonstrators were told to leave, and explains the political and strategic rationale of SAS leaders for their decision to separate themselves from their white student allies. As SAS leader Bill Sales later noted, “There was no real rift between SAS and SDS,” but the black students, in their role of giving voice to the Harlem community, needed to have a “distinctive identity” in negotiations with the Columbia administration.

Bradley goes on to indicate the role of SDS solidarity in increasing white student support for the Black Liberation Movement. He includes a description of what happened when a thousand New York City police were called in by the Columbia administration on April 30, 1968, to arrest student protesters.

Bradley breaks some new ground in late 1960s Columbia historiography by showing how, “at Columbia, the strategies and goals of Black Student Power continued into the spring of 1969 as the black student group, with the support of SDS, called for changes in admission policies,” and observes that in the 1960s Columbia’s black students “were regularly stopped by the security guards…to have their identifications checked while most white students were not stopped.” Bradley is among the first historians to give a detailed account of black student activism at Columbia in 1968–69. He also provides a concise summary of black student protests at Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, showing that despite the disproportionate media attention Columbia received, it was “not the only Ivy League university to be impacted by Black Power” in the late 1960s. Yet as late as 1984 there were still only three tenured black professors at Columbia, and the university did not recognize a black studies program until 1987.

One very useful feature of the book is its collection of previously hard-to-find photos of some of the black participants in the uprising and also of the excavated gymnasium construction site in Morningside Park. But the book also has some omissions and inaccuracies. For example, it inaccurately states that Mark Rudd “decided not to return to school” in the Fall of 1968, when – as Rudd notes in his recent autobiography, Underground – he was actually expelled from Columbia. In addition, although Bradley notes that “SAS and SDS participated in student-supported on-campus demonstrations throughout the month of May,” readers of the book would not learn that on May 21, 1968, the Columbia administration called police onto its campus a second time; the police rioted again, and a leader of SAS, Ray Brown, was clubbed to the ground and then kicked systematically by a crowd of cops.

Despite these few omissions or inaccuracies, Harlem vs. Columbia University reflects a deeper anti-racist perspective than previous books about the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, and does a better job of showing how the Black Power Movement, the Harlem community, the Black radical left and left nationalist intelligentsia, and black students and community activists shaped the events at Columbia in 1968 and 1969 and also the current position of African-Americans in the Ivy League academic world. For anyone interested in these topics, Harlem vs. Columbia University should be considered required reading.

2010 Bob Feldman, Member, Columbia SDS Steering Committee, 1967-68
Co-author of 1968 pamphlet, Columbia and the Community
feldcan@yahoo.com

Mark Rudd’s memoir is a welcome and intelligent addition to the growing catalog of books on the history of the 1960s. Like previous Weather Underground Organization (WUO) members Cathy Wilkerson and Bill Ayers, Rudd discusses his experience in the WUO with the insight that the passage of time often provides. That being said, Underground is not a political book but a personal book of a man whose politics have defined much of his life.

Rudd begins with a vivid description of his introduction to the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). An inquiring college freshman with concerns about racism in the United States and war in Southeast Asia, Rudd was quite open to the arguments of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) by the time its organizer David Gilbert knocked on his dorm room door. Within weeks, Rudd was involved in organizing campaigns against the war, and by the following academic year the ICV had become a chapter of national SDS. Campaigns against the presence of the Pentagon-connected think tank Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and Columbia’s expansion into the Harlem community were growing in intensity. SDS chapters around the country were engaged in debate regarding the best means of organizing – direct action or education? By the following spring of 1968, the direct action faction was in control of Columbia’s chapter. This fact, combined with the university administration’s growing intransigence regarding SDS opposition to the IDA and to the planned gym on Harlem parkland, insured that a confrontation would ensue. Rudd’s account of the Columbia events of late March and April 1968 is first-hand and visceral; it rivals the best descriptions anywhere, losing nothing with the passage of time.

More revealing politically than his descriptions of the external events, however, are his narrative of the journey undertaken by him and his closest SDS allies. These are many of the folks that would form Weatherman. Rudd describes their desire to rid themselves of the vestiges of US bourgeois life via self-criticism sessions, street-fighting, and other activities. Weathermembers were convinced that these practices would destroy their middle-class hangups while bringing communist revolution to the United States. He explains the original Weatherman statement in a few paragraphs. Weather believed that the overextension of US forces, fighting wars overseas and quelling domestic disturbances, would lead to revolutionary conditions in the United States. Weather saw their task as joining those involved in attacking the US internally. They also saw the US working class as predominantly reactionary, yet held out hope for the youth of that class. This hope was based on the special oppression that youth faced – the draft and attacks on youth culture being the most obvious. The first major action based on this theory was to become known as the Days of Rage (Chicago, 1969).

After the relative failure of this action, the Weatherman leadership – of which Rudd was no longer a part – decided to engage the foco theory at its most basic. This approach, which had been applied successfully by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, held that small groups of revolutionaries could organize people with bold actions against the state. The Weather leadership believed the theory’s success in the United States had been proven at Columbia and elsewhere. However, it had never been practiced in the manner that the Weather leadership was considering in late 1969. This is when the Weather leadership decided to go underground and engage in armed struggle against the United States. Rudd remarks that while he supported the general idea of the foco theory, he was dismayed at the top-down nature of the decision and also afraid for himself and his comrades. The decision was presented to the Weatherman organization and the media at the National War Council in December 1969. Soon afterwards, members of the group began either going underground or leaving Weatherman.

As Rudd describes his move into the underground, he tellingly recounts an experience he and fellow Weatherman John Jacobs (JJ) shared in Philadelphia. It involved the two men sharing a space in a dwelling lent to them by a politically sympathetic couple. Soon, both JJ and Rudd are sleeping with the woman, with little regard for her already existing relationship. Ultimately, Rudd acknowledges the male supremacist conduct of many of the men in Weatherman’s early days, and that the anti-monogamous practices had little to do with liberation.

His discussion of Weatherman’s early obsession with violence is deeper and more personal. He relates two primary trends within the organization. One, which was championed by (among others) Terry Robbins and JJ, called for upping the ante by forming armed squads that would kill; the other, which did not (according to Rudd) truly develop until after the fatal March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion (where Robbins and two other WUO members were killed), was committed to actions that would not kill or injure people. These actions would be designed to increase the militancy of the mass movement but not alienate Weather from that movement. The latter position prevailed. Within days of this announcement at a meeting in California, JJ left the organization at the leadership’s request. Although Rudd agreed with the change of direction, he characterizes JJ’s departure as a purge. According to Rudd, Robbins’ death and JJ’s departure made it possible to blame the so-called “military error” on Terry Robbins and JJ alone, and not on the entire organization.

Rudd’s memoir is littered with regret. There are also remnants of personal and political bitterness. This fact in itself makes for a good memoir, but not the best political biography. There is a tendency to simplify political disagreements. His personal bitterness toward the Weather organization occasionally ends up being directed towards the entire Left. In taking this attitude, Rudd dismisses the Weather Underground’s relevance and diminishes the political context from which it sprang. After all, there are political and historical reasons why the WUO was formed that go beyond the personal frustrations of its members.

Another problem with Rudd’s book is his characterization of groups engaged in revolutionary armed struggle as “ideological cults.” The history surrounding this question proves otherwise. Revolutionary armed struggle is not a cultish activity, but a means toward liberation historically used by people opposed to colonialism, imperialism and oppression. The fact that the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization incorrectly believed that the people of the United States were ready for such a struggle and failed does not alter that. It only asserts that the WUO was wrong in its assessment.

2010 Ron Jacobs
Asheville, North Carolina
rjacobs3625@charter.net

Contemporary queer politics seems to be dominated by issues of social inclusion such as gay marriage, open military service, and adoption rights. These pragmatic concerns reflect the logic of privatization advanced by neoliberal ideologies, which tend to privilege private “rights” over public well-being (e.g. universally affordable healthcare, housing, and good education). At stake is a contested understanding of what democracy entails for queers today: should homosexuals seek inclusion into state legal apparatuses and mainstream hetero-social life under the heading of “equality”? Or, should queers devote political energies into exploding such aspirations and forging novel ways of being? Given these questions, Benjamin Shepard’s Queer Political Performance and Protest offers a welcome reminder of some of the radical goals and tactics that have defined queer politics over the last 50 years. While Shepard does acknowledge some of the more conservative, assimilationist aspirations within queer political histories (from homophile movements in the 1950s and 1960s to sex panic in the 1990s), his primary goal is to chronicle struggles against homophobia, violence, sickness, death and sexual moralizing that have invigorated the more radical imaginations within GLBT activism. In doing so, Shepard demonstrates the diversity and uniqueness of queer world-making and, more importantly, the necessity for creativity in political action.

The book is organized chronologically, analyzing specific cases and events in queer history in order to highlight the elements of fun, pleasure, and theatricality that Shepard argues are unique to queer political action. Shepard begins the book with the story of Jose´ Sarria, a San Francisco cabaret singer and drag performer who ran for political office in 1961, years before Harvey Milk entered the scene. Drawing on interviews with Sarria, Shepard shows us how Sarria’s performances – inspired by Weimar-era cabaret – became a platform for vocalizing against homophobia and police harassment as well as an occasion for queers to recognize common political concerns and cultures. Shepard then focuses on the years around and following the Stonewall riots, when groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and Radical Faeries began to advocate sexual pleasure and freedom as legitimate and necessary goals. Although it would hardly be possible to locate a single, cohesive queer movement during this time, Shepard emphasizes how sexual play in performances, bars, and gay baths was pivotal for developing a pluralistic queer community which sought to de-pathologize homosexuality and, more generally, to acknowledge sex as part of public life.

Shepard brings us next to the time immediately following the outbreak of HIV/AIDS, narrating the profound work and impact of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACTUP. Shepard demonstrates how playfulness, theatricality and fun were intertwined with ACTUP’s more serious agendas such as: condemnation of the state’s attacks on homosexuality and its inaction around AIDS; addressing complacency within the gay community; countering the social isolation of gays brought on by the epidemic; and later, in various ACTUP spinoff groups, fighting homelessness and poverty as well as establishing needle exchanges for drug-users. Central to Shepard’s argument is that the creative, theatrical elements of ACTUP’s political tactics were indispensable not only in getting its messages across to an often hostile public but also for keeping its own members’ spirits high in the face of death, fear, and loss. For Shepard, the freshness and fun of ACTUP’s projects and weekly meetings was precisely the condition for its political resiliency. One of the most interesting of ACTUP’s creative tactics were the so-called “zaps” – high-profile political pranks such as interrupting the CBS evening news or dropping a pro-choice banner on the Statue of Liberty. While maybe considered silly, childish, or unserious compared to mainstream models for political protest that utilized “normal” channels, ACTUP’s zaps not only sent pointed messages to a large audience but perhaps more importantly became a means of community-building and solidarity within the movement since these zaps required so much planning, organization, and risk.

The final chapters bring us to the late 1990s when concerns for public health, economic revitalization, and urban “quality of life” became coded attacks on sex, especially queer sex. Within the gay community, many conservative critics such as Michelangelo Signorile and Andrew Sullivan complained that AIDS prevention measures were not working because of the turpitude of gay culture, with promiscuous sex allegedly leading to higher infection rates and gay men therefore seen as reckless – even murderous – predators. More generally, sex had become a national obsession, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Disneyfication of Times Square, which in New York City led to zoning laws giving the city power to arbitrarily decide which bars or bookstores could stay open and which ones closed. It is this context that SexPanic! (a group in which Shepard himself was involved) began to advance their pro-sex agenda: to stop closures of porn shops, bars and gay nightlife; to promote sexual liberation and de-stigmatization; and to resist state monitoring of gays’ sexual practices. As with ACTUP, SexPanic! incorporated fun and lightness into their weekly meetings, a necessary practice Shepard argues because it assuaged the conflict and fear that often emerged within the group. SexPanic! also utilized creative tactics to communicate their ideas – teach-ins, pranks, controversial print ads and stickers, performances. Later, groups such as Circus Amok and Fed Up Queers (FUQ) created impromptu street performances and carnivals to convey a similar pro-sex message.

Queer Political Performance and Protest is a fascinating and necessary book as much for readers familiar with the history of queer politics as for those who are new to it. A primary strength of the book is Shepard’s extensive use of interviews and first-hand stories in his analysis. The range and diversity of the stories he relays gives the book an intimacy and immediacy rare in academic social science. The stories show us the range of possibility for queer activism, its successes and failures, and the importance of storytelling itself – of remembering. At the same time, Shepard is alert to the historical milieu and political stakes of the movements that he chronicles. Because of this, the book offers an expansive and multidimensional account of the struggles that queers have faced in the last 50 years and their creative, often radical means of protest. While the book appears at times to be sprawling or disorganized, Shepard grounds his discussion as a whole with the concept of play. For Shepard, play encompasses various political goals (such as recognition of pleasure, affirmation of life, visibility) but also the kinds of strategies and tactics unique to queer activism (theatricality, creativity, humor.) In all of the events and case studies he examines, Shepard demonstrates how play in some iteration or another is a primary component of both the content and means of queer protest.

As play takes on different meanings in the book’s various chapters, we see that it functions more as an organizing theme than as a theory. Shepard’s aim is simply to describe the importance of play rather than to explain it. Certain questions come to mind but are not taken up; for example: Has play been a necessary part of other social movements or is it something unique to queer movements? In the latter case, did play emerge as a conscious tactic or is it the effect of queers’ marginalization? Is play also part of queer political life in non-urban places? Where does play fit into contemporary queer theory, especially in relation to recent works in the field that draw, as does Shepard, from Marxian thinkers of social change, knowledge, and aesthetics?1

Throughout the book, Shepard makes frequent reference to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, a seminal text in its theorization of how play and the erotic fit into social protest. Yet a contradiction emerges in Shepard’s work in that he overlooks the fact that Marcuse does not address sexuality but rather the erotic in general; in fact, Marcuse later condemns sexual pleasure as a “one-dimensional” instrumentalization of the erotic, a type of “repressive desublimation.”2 Thus, Marcuse’s advancement of play as political must not be viewed as specific to sexuality or sexual subjectivity (as Shepard seems to argue) but to the surplus repression associated with the performance principle endemic to work within modern capitalism. So, while Shepard effectively sustains play as a compelling theme for thinking about queer politics, the question remains – particularly in light of Marcuse’s work – whether play is unique to queer social movements or whether it can also be found in other contemporary social movements. Indeed the blurring of work and play that is concomitant with post-Fordist production or with late capitalism suggests that the entrance of play into the “work” of social movements might be a more generalized trend – a trend we may see addressed and elaborated further in Shepard’s forthcoming companion volume on play and social movements. Nonetheless, Queer Political Performance and Protest is a fine contribution to scholarship on social movements. Part of its success is that Shepard performs a kind of playfulness in the text itself by intertwining stories, interviews, and personal anecdotes with thoughtful, incisive analysis of queer social movements. Above all, the book is an essential reminder of the distinctive character of queer political life and its ongoing – even crucial – need for creativity and pleasure in its imaginations.

Notes

1. See Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, which draws largely on the work of Georg Lukacs and also Herbert Marcuse; and Jose´ Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press, 2009, inspired by the work of Ernst Bloch as well as Marcuse.

2. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, 73–76.

2010 John Andrews
Department of Sociology Graduate Center, City University of New York Jandrews@gc.cuny.edu

When members of the surviving old guard of surrealism declared the movement over in October 1969 in Le Monde, there were many dissenters. International adherents to the idea that surrealism is a state of mind rather than a historical movement affirmed their continued loyalty to its revolutionary principles. Lowy locates these at the intersection of Marxism and anarchism, a mix that aims to pose a counterweight to capitalist rationalism and disenchantment (Max Weber) by re-enchanting the world. Myth, poetry, art created in a spirit of revolt by the unleashing of the forces of dream and the unconscious – these have been liberatory gestures and practices that are common to the subjects of Lowy’s engaging essays, from Benjamin to Debord, from Pierre Naville to Vincent Bouonore and Claude Cahun.

It is well known that Andre´ Breton, the founder and leader of the surrealist movement, embraced revolutionary Marxism in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1930; at the same time, the founder of the surrealist movement, who insisted that “language has been given to man so that he may make surrealist use of it” was unlikely, from the start, to adhere to any party line. Lowy characterizes Breton’s Marxism as “libertarian,” a mix of the revolt against Western civilization and bourgeois norms of morality and normality, combined with the explosive force of poetry (Lautre´amont, Rimbaud) and the English gothic novel. When Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, the important text they co-authored was the call “For an Independent Revolutionary Art,” which asserts the anarchist ideal of absolute freedom for artists. Breton conceived of this freedom as dialectical in the sense that artists were called to break away from the confining circles of rationality, decorum, and the “beautiful.” Breton was a Hegelian as much as a Marxist. In place of the old hegemonic myths (surrealists excoriated their civilization which had put in place the “myth of money”), they proposed the “morning star” that they linked to the mythical rebellion of Lucifer. Myth without religion – surrealist texts and exhibitions were well-known for proposing a new pantheon, many of its notables drawn from the figures of alchemy and the tarot which Carl Jung had already exposed as allegories of self-transcendence.

The ideal of freedom, which Lowy links to surrealism’s revolutionary romanticism, is the common thread that runs through all the essays. When allied with real political activism, surrealism is a force to be reckoned with, as the chapters on Claire Cahun and Guy Debord show. Cahun had joined the surrealist movement in 1932; two years later she penned the defense of revolutionary poetry, Les paris sont ouverts (“The bets are on”) in which she advocated the use of poetry for “indirect action,” leaving the reader open to draw his/her own conclusions. Literature will be most effective, she argued, if it is subversive and not propagandistic.

The next chapter in Cahun’s life – which many readers will discover for the first time in these pages – is a source of astonishment for all those who hear of it. When the German forces occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, Cahun and her life-companion Suzanne Malherbe put theory into action. Under the cover of appearing as harmless older women they circulated subversive anti-Nazi texts to the occupying soldiers, signing their names as the “Nameless Soldier.” In some cases they even produced anti-fascist photomontages whose source material was the Nazi magazine Signal. Their texts – hidden inside newspapers and magazines, deposited in Nazi mailboxes, left on parked cars or attached to fences – called on soldiers to desert or kill their officers. Remarkably, the two women operated for four whole years before they were eventually denounced by an informer. Only the end of the war saved them from the death sentence that had been meted out to them.

Guy Debord is another artist who put the arsenal of language and art in the service of revolution. Today, as Lowy acknowledges, the father of “situationism” is often dismissed as a superficial critic of mass media, or as a mere litterateur. Just as Cahun’s work is now being rediscovered, Lowy urges us to take another look at Debord, whose concept of the “society of the spectacle” was nothing less than a critique of “the whole economic, social, and political system of modern capitalism.” Situationism, he argues, lies at the base of the most audacious dreams and aspirations of ‘68. Debord’s nostalgic turn away from modernity was intended as an explosive and subversive force that had much in common with surrealism. Once again, the strategies are textual – Debord’s lengthy screenplay In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (a palindrome that roughly translates as “we wander in darkness and are consumed by fire”) cannibalizes existing texts and films and infuses them with new meaning.

The dark side of romantic rebellion that Lowy identifies in all his subjects is also linked with revolutionary pessimism, which is the core subject of the book’s longest and most central chapter on Pierre Naville, whose landmark essay “Revolution and the Intellectuals,” written in 1925–26 and read by the surrealists even before its publication in 1928, gave the impetus for the alliance between surrealism and Marxism. Lowy recounts that it was Naville’s infiuence that led Breton and other surrealists to join the Communist party in 1927. “Revolutionary pessimism” in Naville’s formulation meant an active, revolutionary engagement, a spirit akin to Goethe’s Mephistopheles (who describes himself as “the spirit that always negates”). In this chapter Lowy charts a clear course through the internal debates between different factions of the surrealists as they interfaced with different factions of the Communist Left in France and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Along the way, Naville, who had embraced the Trotskyist Left Opposition, fell out of favor with Breton, who actually excoriated him in the dramatic turn toward Marxism that runs through the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1930. A reconciliation finally took place in 1938 when Naville facilitated the meeting between Trotsky and Breton.

Naville’s concept of organized, revolutionary pessimism impressed Walter Benjamin, who published the epochal essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intelligence” in February 1929. Benjamin correctly estimated the vast infiuence that surrealism would come to exert; in the opening lines of his essay, he compares himself to the observer of the vast energy generated downstream from what had appeared, in France, as a mere trickle. In a continuation of that metaphor, Benjamin writes that surrealism “harnessed the forces of intoxication for the revolution,” although he criticizes its “undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication” and the neglect of “the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution” (Selected Writings, Vol. II, Harvard University Press, 1999: 217). Thinking is for him a narcotic of the first order, and its “profane illumination” should make it possible for the “revolutionary intelligentsia to overthrow the intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses” (217). (Unfortunately the editor, has left out the more detailed chapter on Benjamin that appeared in the original French edition, so that the discussion of his important writings on surrealism is limited to some remarks in the Naville chapter.)

For those already interested in surrealism and its infiuence, many of these chapters provide welcome information on the fate of the surrealists, and Surrealism, after WWII. A final chapter on “the surrealist international since 1969” gives a historical account of the more recent surrealist publications, among them the Bulletin de liaison surre´aliste and Surre´alisme (Vincent Buonore, who with several French and Czech Surrealist friends put together La Civilisation surre´aliste in 1976, gets a chapter to himself). Today there are surrealist groups in Paris, Prague, Stockholm Madrid, Chicago, and Sa˜o Paulo, along with half a dozen new journals devoted to surrealism.

An appealing feature of this volume is the presence of art work by many of Lowy’s international surrealist friends, as well as some of his own drawings. Several of these amplify the themes of the book – Guy Girard’s “Rosa Luxemburg in front of the Tour St. Jacques” from 1993 imagines her in the context of Breton’s peregrinations in Paris with their multiple references to alchemy and the marvelous (Nadja) while Jean-Pierre Guillon’s “Couronne´e de Commune” from 1980 works as an illustration of Benjamin’s statement about revolution and intoxication.

The art work also comprises many contributions by women surrealists – the Prague surrealist Eva Svankmajerova and the Canadian Marie S. (alias “Ingatta”) whose “illuminated envelopes” are beguiling contributions to mail art. By themselves, these point to a salient aspect of present-day surrealism – the presence of impressive women artists and writers. A whole chapter is dedicated to the surrealist artist Ody Saban, a welcome supplement to the French edition.

Unlike the usual art “movements” destined to replace one another, Lowy argues, surrealism is a transhistorical cultural innovation like Romanticism. Its marginality is also its force, since its aims are necessarily subversive. The dominant metaphor continues to be that of the “starred mole,” a mythical creature who burrows underground, creating passageways and connections that eventually lead to the collapse of the superficial and visible world above. Lowy’s engaging book invites us to the positive labor of “re-enchantment,” providing models for active engagement and stimulus for further reading.

2010 Inez Hedges
Northeastern University
i.hedges@neu.edu

Disasters, more or less by definition, kill people and destroy property. But that is not all they do. They also void contracts, disrupt schedules, and cause organizations to fail. They interrupt daily life. They undermine our usual assumptions.

What happens then? Do people panic? Do they become irrational and helpless? Do they revert to a kind of animal state, amoral, selfish, short-sighted, and fierce?

Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, examines the evidence of recent history, looking at public behavior in numerous disasters of the last hundred years – from the San Francisco earthquake (and then fire) of 1906, to the Halifax explosion of 1917, to the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, ending with 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. She finds, with astonishing consistency, that when the normal institutions fail people don’t panic, break down, hoard goods, attack passersby, or otherwise fulfill the Mad Max prophecies. Instead, they prove themselves “resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave” (8). When institutions fail, people build community.

Solnit, writing in the tradition of anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin, suggests an evolutionary basis for such sociability, arguing that species capable of cooperation have an evolutionary advantage, based on mutual aid developing as “a default operating principle” (313). But she also considers the question from a more spiritual perspective. While never applied in a religiously doctrinal sense, the rhetoric of “paradise,” “hell,” and being “our brothers’ keepers” pervades the text, beginning of course with the title.

Whether spiritually or scientifically construed, the fundamental question is one of human nature. Solnit contends that “there are many human natures, shaped by culture and circumstance,” and that “the majority of human natures on display in disaster may not suggest who we are ordinarily or always, but they do suggest who we could be and tend to be in these circumstances” (49). She also remarks:

Two things matter most about these ephemeral moments. First, they demonstrate what is possible or, perhaps more accurately, latent: the resilience and generosity of those around us and their ability to improvise another kind of society. Second, they demonstrate how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism, and  purposefulness. (305f)

These desires lie deep within us, though, in “normal” times it is difficult to adequately express or fulfill them.

If we are in some ways Hobbesian creatures – isolated, selfish, and cruel – it is because the capitalist market both demands and rewards just such characteristics. However, when the normal routine is interrupted and the institutions of society suddenly disappear, even if through adversity or tragedy, the result is still a kind of freedom. The crisis offers a reprieve from the constraints of our social system. And given the choice, people tend to behave in ways almost calculated to confound the authoritarian predictions: cooperatively, compassionately, and with striking courage and intelligence.

Well, most people. Solnit notes that the largest exception consists of those trying desperately to preserve or return to the status quo ante – “those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism” (2). These are, in the usual case, exactly those people who present themselves as our protectors – the agents of the state. In their efforts to regain control, the authorities tend to treat the public as the enemy.

In most of the cases Solnit describes, the state prioritized the protection of property over human life, shooting looters rather than launching rescue operations. In many cases, police and soldiers actively interfered with any efforts the survivors employed to aid themselves. And a great deal of the time, the authorities behaved not only meanly, but foolishly, making the humanitarian crisis needlessly worse – withholding vital information, trapping people in dangerous areas, or (in San Francisco) spreading the fire they were meant to be fighting. All of these tendencies, and their terrible consequences, were on display following, for example, Hurricane Katrina.

Also, in New Orleans, cops and soldiers were supplemented by racist vigilantes who blocked escape routes and shot Black men more or less at random. “Here was the marauding, murdering gang the media had been obsessed with,” Solnit sardonically notes, “except that it was made up of old white people, and its public actions went unnoticed” (253).

Solnit explains these anti-social exceptions with reference to the ideology of the people involved. “Beliefs matter,” she says repeatedly. “You had to believe, first, that all African American men are criminals and intruders and, second, that people in a disaster have a pressing interest in acquiring private property, to act as the vigilantes did” (257).

At the level of the individual – cop, soldier, or armed property owner – such simple, delusional prejudice is certainly a factor. But at the level of the state, I think the theory of “elite panic” (a phrase Solnit borrows from sociologist Kathleen Tierney) gives the authorities too much credit – or perhaps too little. It assumes that their intentions are good but that the state’s attitude toward the citizenry fundamentally changes in the midst of disaster, that the authorities succumb to distrust and antagonism at precisely the moment that community members learn to cooperate, to trust and rely on each other. Misguided, unnecessary, counter-productive violence results.

But maybe, just as disaster sometimes reveals the best qualities within human beings, those virtues that too often lay dormant, it also exposes the worst qualities of our social systems. Maybe the violence typical of the elite response is not a by-product of the disaster, but an expression of the normal relationships of power, stripped of the sheen of legitimacy. When the usual social framework fails, inequality can only be re-imposed by force. But then, wouldn’t this suggest that violence is always implicit in these relationships, even when it is not made manifest? If so, then disasters offer, not only a glimpse of a world without our existing institutions, but also an insight into the present society that they structure.

And here is another reason why disasters matter: There are more catastrophes, both economic and ecological, looming on the horizon. A great many people are going to suffer – some inevitably, some needlessly – while states fight to preserve their sovereign rule and corporations callously, cynically, pursue higher profits.

But perhaps we, the rest of us, can seek out something else instead. Perhaps, just past the horizon, on the far edge of the storm, we will find the shores of utopia. Or perhaps, just as we are always in the midst of disaster – this disaster called capitalism – we are also always in the process of building paradise.

Nothing is assured, of course. No paradise is inevitable. But Solnit has assembled a volume of evidence that utopias are possible, and that they sometimes arise under the most surprising conditions.

2010 Kristian Williams, Author
American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination; Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
info@kristianwilliams.com

For anyone who wants to learn the ABCs of the Cuban health system, this is the book. The six sections divide into: a history and an overview of the current healthcare system; treatment of specific diseases such as breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, etc.; social services featuring chapters on dementia and on the elderly; mental health; three short chapters covering the Jewish community, Chinese-Cubans, and Afro-Cuban women; and a very brief look at Cuba’s international health care programs. The writing is concise, not overly technical, and nearly always to the point. The nineteen authors split between Cubans and non-Cubans, and almost every article is based upon fieldwork and many include interview material with participants – both health workers and recipients of services. The resulting anecdotal passages give the study a further human dimension.

Several things strike the reader immediately. First is the system’s integrated nature. The contributors clearly show the various levels of planning, concern, and care as well as interactions between MINSAP (Ministry for Health) and even the smallest rural communities. Care includes not only family doctors who make house calls regularly, but active intervention on numerous levels by any number of national and local organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women or the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Beyond this, neighbors look after neighbors and families are shown how best to care for members in need. There is plenty of interchange between generations too in the care of the elderly or care of youngsters. Second, the system does its best to look at the big picture, the total environment, when examining those in need of medical attention. In addition, all kinds of therapies come into play, traditional and non-traditional medicine, or music therapy which is the focus of one chapter. Preventive rather than curative medicine is another large theme. A solid educational network trains personnel in both general and specialized health practices. Third, that this is all done at no cost to the patient and on an equal basis to all boggles the mind of those used to the system here in the United States where most physicians make six figures minimally and all too often receive goodies from drug companies as well. Cuba, with limited resources has invented a health system whose results in many areas such as longevity rival those of developed societies.

So has Cuba achieved the perfect health system? No, but the system has served and serves as a model for poorer nations. The book correctly notes problems at all levels of care. While many of these are due to or exacerbated by the US embargo against Cuba (which prevents or severely limits the shipment of medicines and updated equipment), an inadequate infrastructure and systemic inefficiencies also lower health standards. The Special Period (ca. 1992–2006) brought particular strains in that incidence of sickness increased due to insufficient diets and more acute shortages of medicines. Still, the articles make it clear that the system is back on track. One myth that is dispelled by several authors is the purported use of “political diagnosis,” whereby dissidents supposedly would be declared mentally incompetent and locked up.

The Cuban Revolution if nothing else has always been internationalist. A dimension in the health field that is only briefly touched upon, but which has huge implications, is Cuba’s international efforts. These range from sending doctors to countries with almost non-existing health systems, to founding hospitals and training centers overseas in Africa and Asia, to the creation of the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba which trains doctors from all over the continent including a significant contingent from the United States (another center trains people from just the Caribbean), to the sending of medical teams to wealthier countries such as Venezuela where the services are compensated, helping Cuba’s economy and rewarding the individuals involved, and just plain emergency aid such as the efforts after hurricanes devastated Central America in 1998. Almost no US news sources noted that in addition to several hundred medical personnel already in Haiti at the time of the recent earthquake, Cuba quickly sent an additional contingent of doctors to help out. In fact, those already there set up a medical facility outside the main hospital in Port-au-Prince which had collapsed and remained inoperative (see Wall Street Journal, January 23–24, 2010, A8).

It seems strange to say that a book which reminds us constantly of the health problems that exist in all societies is joyous. But these pages exude a remarkable love for humanity and a spirit of love (a recommended therapeutic in Cuba for young adults by the way) and community. The authors, who all teach at the Yeshiva School for Social Work, should be congratulated for having brought together such a significant work.

2010 Hobart A. Spalding
Socialism and Democracy
hspalding@cnpt.org