Category: Book Reviews
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Ian Angus’s “The War Against the Commons”: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism
Review of The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus, reviewed by Steve Leigh in Firebrand, republished by Monthly Review Online, 22 May 2024 In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of…
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How rich-country government and World Bank funding to for-profit private hospitals causes harm, and why it should be stopped
By Anna Marriott, Oxfam International, 26 June 2023 Development finance institutions owned by European governments and the World Bank Group are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive for-profit hospitals in the Global South that block patients from getting care, or bankrupt them, with some even imprisoning patients who cannot afford their bills. At…
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First, Do No Harm: Examining the impact of the IFC’s support to private healthcare in India
By Anjela Taneja and Amitabha Sarkar, Oxfam International, 26 June 2023 This report examines the support to private healthcare provision in India by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Despite supporting private healthcare in the country since 1997, no healthcare results for lending and investments have been disclosed since the…
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Mazzucato’s Mission economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism
Book Review by Mark Howard, published in Review of Radical Political Economics (22 April 2024). [Mariana Mazzucato served as chair of WHO’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. See Final Report (May 2023). Howard’s assessment of her approach to ‘changing capitalism’ is relevant to an appreciation of the report to WHO. – DGL]…
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Looming debt crisis, deepening inequality, lack of investment in climate mitigation and adaptation: UN Trade and Development calls for structural reform
Globally, in the first quarter of 2024, economic growth is slowing; private investment is stagnant, income inequality is increasing; and consumption expenditure is increasingly sustained by private borrowing. The UN Trade and Development Report Update (April, 2024) is a ‘must read’ for understanding the structure and direction of the global economy. Higher interest rates in…
