"As continuing food shortages expand onwards in scale and scope, the usual strategy of blaming the victims for over-population, insufficient investment in human capital, or simply because they lack a 'protestant ethic' to work hard, despite being theoretically and empirically vacuous, continues to hold sway."

The moral of the tale...is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers (Marx, 1894/1991, p. 216).

For the past 500-million years greenhouse gases (GHG) have fluctuated in a narrow band of between 260-280 parts per million (ppm) by volume. Today, however, they stand at over 385ppm, 30% higher than previous peaks in volume in interglacial periods. The potential for a new climatic state, expected to rise 5-6 degrees Celsius by 2100 if present trends continue, may lead to catastrophic socio-ecological events as major food and water shortages, the destruction of fertile lands, shifts in weather patterns, massive species extinction and the destabilization of major ice-sheets and glaciers raise sea-levels upwards of 2-metres this century engulfing land presently occupied by at least 1-billion people. Moreover, with 1-billion people suffering from chronic and severe hunger and another 2-billion facing perpetual food insecurity and poverty continuing ecological degradation is likely to cause the greatest harm to those who have contributed to it the least.

As food crises continue to mushroom throughout the global south, with food prices rising 140% between 2002-2008, some immediate questions then become imperative: Is there a major shortage of the food needed to feed the world's population or are there issues of redistribution, usage and agricultural practices that negatively affect access to foodstuffs? What is the relationship between food insecurity, poverty, ill-health and ecological decay? Since access to the means of life in capitalist society is near-universally mediated through market compulsions, what are the social 'laws of motion' which govern resource extraction, production, distribution, exchange and waste disposal? The forthcoming analysis will, first, discuss the inherent environmental destructiveness of capitalism; second, overview the dialectics of long-term trends with short-term neoliberal policies; third, explore the Cuban alternative to capitalist agriculture; and, fourth, conclude on the need to (re)generate socialist inspiration.

On the Inherent Environmental Destructiveness of Capitalism

In Capital Vol.1, Marx (1990, p.449) argues, "The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest extent possible, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus-value; hence the greatest exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist". Though relatively short on words, this brief sentence lends major insight into the historically-specific social relations which govern capitalist production. First, Marx is suggesting that the governing purpose of producing a commodity is to make a profit on that commodity; whether selling bread, medication or guns, the commodity itself is not so important so long as its value at the point of exchange is greater than that at the point of production. Second, Marx's concept of surplus-value stresses that human labour-power in transforming nature creates the value which is embodied in a particular commodity. Though the worker's labour-power is congealed in that commodity, giving it its added value, its surplus is appropriated strictly by the capitalist. It is at this point, thirdly, where Marx deconstructs the structural basis of inequality, that is, fundamentally antagonistic class relations. In pointing to the centrality of class, as the broadest though by no means absolute point of exploitation, Marx was unpacking the way the unequal appropriation of the social surplus product through intersecting axes of exploitation - race, gender, ethnicity, age - leaves the overwhelming majority of persons with nothing but their labour-power to sell.

Marx's conception of class was radically different than the classical political economists' understanding. For Adam Smith, J.B. Say and David Ricardo, for example, classes were seen as repressing each other. For liberals it was 'progress against the old order' which was to be overcome - historically against the church and aristocracy, and today, in its neoliberal veneer, against the state and indeed the masses. For liberals, and neoliberals as we will later see, class is predominantly a function of privilege, social rank and opportunity and is not defined in Marx's terms as fundamentally exploitive and antagonistic relations. Class struggle for liberals is viewed as 'holding back' another class, what Comninel (1987; 2006) has referred to as the 'Pez-dispenser' or 'ladder-version' of class, and not a conflict over the appropriation of the social surplus product. Instead an historical materialist account of class stresses essentially exploitative class relations, lord and serf, capitalist and worker, propertied and property-less, which is the paired opposition of classes and a very different social relation distinct from ranks of classes. While there have always been classes in society, class relations in capitalist society take on a very specific manifestation, that is to say, the 'symbiotic embrace' of political-economic, hence social, exploitation whereby workers are estranged from the fruits of their labour.

The historically-specific imperatives of capitalism, namely its cutthroat drive towards infinite accumulation, increasing exploitation of labour in the form of productivity gains and efficiency, techno-centrism and market irrationality, disguise the fact that capitalist markets are not governed by opportunity and choice, but compulsion and necessity. As Wood (2003) has argued, material life and social reproduction in capitalism are universally mediated by the market so that all individuals must enter into market relations in one way or another to gain access to the means of life. In denaturalizing the liberal account of capitalism, Marx sought to show that social relations of capital were not 'natural', transhistorical or unchanging, but rooted in specific material and cultural changes distinct from earlier periods. That said, capitalism in no way represents the epitome of civilization, the end of history or progressive modernity, but just as capitalism came to birth through historical struggles it may also come to its end ushering in a very different and historically transient means of reproducing the means of life.

For Marx and Engels, capitalism creates an 'irreparable metabolic rift' whereby the material exchange between our environments and society - a conceptual as opposed to absolute distinction - disturbs the organic interchange of plant materials, as well as recycling of air, water currents and agricultural infertility, for example. Since the systemic imperatives of capitalism run counter to any ecological notions of natural limits, critical thresholds and consumptive restrictions it is inherently anti-ecological, since all things are systematically subordinated in pursuit of unlimited accumulation and ever-increasing scales of production. Just as capitalism compels market-dependence through the alienation of labour, so too does it establish a historically-distinctive relation with nature. The social metabolic interchange of society and nature, that is, the recognition of reflexive movement and reciprocal transformation, stresses the organic and inorganic exchange of matter and energy, which are in on-going and joint transformation. As Marx argued in Vol.1 of Capital (p. 283),

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between nature and himself. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own [organic] body - arms, legs, head, hands - in order to appropriate the materials of [his inorganic body] nature in a form adapted to his own need. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.

In other words, "Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuous dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature" (Marx, 1844/1964, p.112). Since all species are mutable and subject to the 'struggle for existence', the fact that society's metabolism with nature is not motionless but continuously transforming and evolving, so that a species once well-adapted to particular conditions of life may find themselves under stress or in decline, is contradictory to any human notions of superiority and dominance.

Likewise, for Engels (1934, Np.), Nature "is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up...at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst." Marx and Engels rejected all essentialisms based on innate human characteristics except for the sociability and transformative labour-bearing capacities of human-beings (zoon politikon), which was constituted and reconstituted through social intercourse. Marx and Engels had a "withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the animals... [since the] creatures too must become free" from subjugation and instrumental rationality. As a new and unprecedented social metabolism with nature continues to manifest, the consequences in the form of an on-going and exacerbating climate change cluster-bomb, coupled with en masse ecological degradation, remains one of the foremost challenges to the livability and social conditions of life on earth in the twenty-first century.

In 1988 at the 'Toronto Conference', [1] scientists, policy makers and government representatives from around the world declared: "Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to nuclear war" (Hardy, 2003, p.x). More than twenty-years later, with little action having taken place since then, both the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Bank have argued that dramatic and irreversible climate change is happening faster than the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report had predicted (UNEP, 2009). The reports suggest that despite an abundance of rhetoric, as opposed to real changes, the surpassing of critical ecological thresholds could usher in a slow-motion tsunami which is likely to threaten human civilization and the sustainability of the biosphere as we know it. Though atmospheric concentration of carbon is often the starting point from which discussions regarding 'global warming' depart, it is crucial to stress that the earth's forests, rivers, lakes and oceans (known in economic literature as 'sinks') are also suffering from debilitating carbon irresponsibility. In striking fashion, the increased carbon absorption by the earth's oceans has elevated the acidity and temperature of the water leading many ecological habitats to suddenly crash after they have hit a point beyond which their natural reproduction capacity cannot function. As Harvey (2004) points out, sardines in California, cod off of Newfoundland and Chilean sea bass, are memorable examples of a resource exploited at an 'optimal' rate that suddenly crashes without any warning.

Melting glaciers, shrinking ice-caps, deforestation, desertification, exhausted fisheries, species extinction and the related 'human effects' - such as massive displacement, increasing food insecurity as a result of extinction and migration, the absorption of fertile soils and unpredictable weather patterns - are but a sample of interconnected uncertainties. It has been estimated that if present trends continue in twenty-years two-thirds of the world population will suffer from water shortages, 12% of bird species and 25% of mammals are threatened with extinction and that over 70% of the earth's fisheries will be depleted, fully-fished and/or over-exploited (Woodin & Lucas, 2004; Gupta, 2001). At the 2007 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali, India, experts were warning that this was the world's "last chance" to avoid complete and irreversible disaster. In fact, if business continues as usual climate change could cut in half food production in parts of the world in as little as 12-years, the Amazon rainforest could turn to a dry savannah, and that the Greenland icecap could melt, causing sea levels to rise by more than 30% worldwide, threatening coastal areas around the globe (Lean, 2007). Access to the means of life, then, and especially food, becomes all the more important as droughts, natural disasters, insect infestations ('superbugs') and agricultural crises intensify.

The Dialectics of Long-term Trends and Short-term Policies

Marx's concept of dialectics stresses an emphasis on wholeness and historicity, connection, context and change, as well as integrated levels of phenomena, the social determination of science and the prioritization of processes over things (Levins, 2008). Understood in this sense, capitalist agriculture must be placed within a social totality whereby the parts affect the whole and the whole in turn affect the parts; in other words, the multi-scaler, multi-temporal, multi-spatial and multi-causal social processes which are in constant flux and motion. Capitalist agriculture is imbued with progressive-modernist notions signifying the dominance of nature by man, a technological Prometheanism whereby the earth is there to be mastered and exploited so as to meet the needs of the human species. Since the goal of all production in capitalist societies is the valorization of capital, this prioritizes capital-intensive monoculture, large-scale production, 'scientific' knowledge and agricultural 'specialization', while concurrently subjugating labour-intensive farming, diversification, small-scale integration, traditional/indigenous knowledge, regional diversity and 'generalists' (Levins, 2008b). In other words, while the former is allegedly modern the latter is presumed anachronistic and backwards. Early socialist experiments, too, as is best exemplified by the former Soviet Union, assumed that developing countries had to catch-up with their 'advanced' counterparts along the single pathway of modernization.

However, as continuing food shortages expand onwards in scale and scope, highlighted by riots in some thirty countries between 2007-2008, the usual strategy of blaming the victims for over-population, insufficient investments in human capital, inadequate quantities of food or simply because they lack a 'protestant ethic' to work hard, despite being theoretically and empirically vacuous, continues to hold sway. As both the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as well as the Food Institute point out "enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories to everyone - substantially more than the minimum required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than the 1960s, despite an increase in the total population" to which we might add "abundance, not scarcity, best describes the food supply in the world today" (cited in Angus, 2008. p.10). The international agricultural industry is not concerned with feeding the world's poor, but with maximizing revenues. Despite the appeal by economic apologists to market rationality, the only thing which is rational about capitalism is its regular irrationality, which results in 18,000 children dying each day from food shortages and another 35,000 from lack of basic sanitation, medicines and access to clean water.

Generally, the neoliberal project, which resurrected the ghosts of the classical liberal political economists of the 18-19th centuries in the 'new' market fundamentalist theories of Milton Friedman and Frederick von Hayek, sought to reestablish the market as the 'neutral arbiter' of society. The rhetoric of neoliberalism stresses cult-like individual liberties, private property, personal responsibility, technological progression and market-mechanisms as a means to social betterment - narrowly understood as infinite economic growth. Central to the theory, as opposed to the practice, is the conviction that governments free the market from restraint and limits on its operational size and scope; this includes freedom from restrictions on organized labour, negligible quotas, duties and levies, as well as lax environmental laws and minimized state interventions into the economy. Understood this way, then, with uncritical demarcations separating the economy, politics and society, self-aggrandizing individuals seeking to fulfill their own needs will miraculously result in the proverbial Say's law whereby supply and demand even-out.

As the most severe and, according to the economists, 'unexpected' socio-economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929 makes painfully clear, not to mention earlier economic crises which were only 'solved' by laying the foundation for deeper and more pronounced crises, markets do not automatically adjust themselves. More specifically, however, the neoliberal policies which took flight in the mid-1970s have had devastating social and ecological consequences for those in the global south, while the modest gains in the global north have come under increasing attack. With high-income earning countries in the global north experiencing stagnant economic growth, rising inflation and a lack of profitable investments throughout the 1970s, multinational corporations, banks, investment firms and Western governments - awash with capital with nowhere to go - looked to the global south to stimulate effective demand. With underdeveloped countries looking to 'catch-up' and 'modernize' neoliberal policies sought to unseat - often violently and militarily - the so-called import-substitution industrialization policies of the quarter-century following WWII, which was prevalent throughout the global south. Mexico is an exemplar case in point.

Upon taking loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) which had particular 'conditionalities' attached to them, such as the removal of protective barriers to trade, recurring currency devaluations to make attractive cheap exports, monocropping in hopes of gaining a 'comparative advantage', the burgeoning of maquilla slums with near non-existent environmental and labour laws, unlimited foreign direct investment and ownership, government downsizing and the removal of food and manufacturing subsidies, as well as sharp decrease in investments in healthcare and education, it had been expected that the Mexican economy would prosper. As is well-known this was certainly not the case. By 1976, Mexico was over $27.3-billion in debt. The doubling of oil prices in 1979 further exacerbated deficits as internationally entrenched markets led to a 50% drop in economic growth in the 'developed' world, which had the spiraling-effect of lowering the price of Mexico's export-dependant commodities and decreasing hard currency values, while increasing the costs of importing basic foodstuffs and manufactured goods (McMichael, 2000; Gooptu, 1993). Meanwhile, in Mexico, the government did reform its tax-system; however, rather than implementing progressive taxation measures, Mexico - in keeping with the vulgar economics of capitalist apologists - followed neoliberal prescriptions which witnessed a massive socialization of the debt and privatization of profits.

By 1981, Mexico was $75-billion in debt and inflation continued to rise at a phenomenal rate. The healthcare and education systems collapsed, half of Mexico's 109-million population lived in extreme poverty on less than $1 per day, wages had fallen 50% between 1983-1989, purchasing parity fell two-thirds to what it was in 1970 and 40% of the population was severely malnourished as the cost of rice, milk, tortillas, eggs, fruit and vegetables increased upwards of 30% over the same period (McMichael, 2000). In the 1990s, with the establishment of the North American Free Trade Act which entrenched the IMF and WB's 'structural adjustment policies' into Mexican law, Mexican plants achieved US productivity levels at 1/7th the wages of their American counterparts, with positive 'externalities' in the form of lax environmental and labour standards, and especially the usage of 'dexterous' women and children, rivaling the conditions of the English working-class so vividly portrayed by Engels in 1887. Mexico had rescheduled its debt payments over five times, inflation was upwards of 150%, currency devaluations were taking place monthly and Mexico's debt had ballooned to $161-billion (40% of GDP). The solution? Intensifying neoliberalism. As Mexico entered the twenty-first century little had changed and, in 2007, the price of tortilla's had shot-up 60% leading to further food riots. The continuing erosion of peasant agriculture in Mexico, as Bello and Baviera (2009) make explicit, has turned the land that domesticated corn into a net food importer, all the while continuing to push peasants who could once provide adequate food for themselves and their communities into urban slums and thereby turning them into indentured wage earners. Similar experiences can be drawn from Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, among numerous others. [2]

(Re)generating the Socialist Imagination: 'Impossible is Nothing'

The anarchy associated with laissez-faire markets, monocropping and unlimited accumulation as an end in itself was painfully demonstrated in 2007-2008 as the US's insatiable appetite for oil saw the global price of wheat rise 108%, essential oils and fats 106%, dairy 47% and overall food prices 83% (Angus, 2008b). The volatility of markets was clearly demonstrated when in 2008, 30% of the US corn harvest went into agrofuel production leading the World Bank to suggest that this had caused a rise of 80% in basic foodstuffs when interconnected food webs and the speculative fervors of overnight riches coalesced. Turning food into fuel, as Fidel Castro once remarked "is a monstrosity" and is akin to the "internalization of genocide" (Castro, 2008). Moreover, it is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but, more often than not, intensive agricultural practices including synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, as well as massive overall effective inputs in the form of mechanization, oil consumption, transport and processing which produce massive amounts of hydrocarbons. On the whole, then, since capitalist production "simultaneously undermines the original sources of all wealth - nature and the worker", rather than just critique capitalist social relations it is high time that alternative implementations be thoroughly envisioned, conceptualized and debated. One such curious case is Cuban society's evolving relations with nature.

Cuba: Coming to Terms With Nature

In a recent article, How Cuba is Going Ecological, Richard Levins (2008c) raises the question: How has a third world country besieged by a hostile neighbour been able to embark on an ecological pathway of development that combines sustainability, equity and quality-of-life goals? The short answer at its highest level of abstraction, he replies, is socialism, [3] the long answer, however, requires some further unpacking. The Cuban revolution in 1959, initially a national-populist uprising as opposed to socialist revolution, immediately aimed at reducing poverty and ill-health, improving water and sanitation, implementing massive literacy campaigns, housing construction and securing access to clean water and viable food sources. From the start, the revolution never left rural Cuban's behind, but looked to strengthen agricultural self-sufficiency, integrate the invidious distinction between town and country and transform Cuban society's relation with nature. The preconditions which led to the flowering of Cuban ecological thought were laid in the early decades of the revolution that sought to radically reclaim productive industries and agricultural lands, as well as make significant improvements in education, healthcare and social planning by the associated producers. Though Cuban achievements in healthcare and education are well-known some further elaboration, while brief, is still necessary.

In short, Cuban healthcare is equal to and surpasses many high-income earning countries in adult life expectancy, infant mortality, vaccinations and physical activity. In fact, Cuban's are among the lowest ranking countries in terms of obesity, tobacco, drug and alcohol abuse, and highest ranking in terms of responsible sexual behaviours, mental health, and equitable access to healthcare. [4] In regards to education, Cuban Primary and Secondary students are on par with their counterparts in the Global North when considering international aptitude tests, though of course problematic, in the areas of mathematics and science. Furthermore, the encouragement and promotion of gender and racial equity campaigns from a young age including equity provisions in higher education, has resulted in substantive benefits for women and Afro-Cubans in university-level science and engineering programs, as well as local, provincial and national legislatures (Fanelli, 2008). [5]

Turning to Cuba's ecology, in shunning capitalism generally and neoliberalism in particular, Cuban agriculture is founded on the presumption that genuine democracy - understood as rule by, of and for the people - begins in local communities with people in their neibourhoods, workplaces, schools and homes. Cuba has been explicit that its model is not a socialist blueprint for copy, but rather an example and demonstration that alternatives do in fact exist. Though some point to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) as the historical turning point in Cuba's agroecological development, i.e. Cuba's 'Special Period', Foster (2008) and others have stressed that Cuba's evolving relations with nature are deeply rooted in the initial developments of the Cuban revolution. Moreover, in the 1970s, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, Cuban politician and ecologist, had introduced arguments for "integral development, laying the groundwork for harmonious development of the economy and social relations with nature" (Levins, 2008c), which was followed by the gradual burgeoning of ecological thought in Cuba throughout the 1980s. The Special Period, Levins (ibid.) explains, allowed the "ecologists by conviction" to recruit and convince the "ecologists by necessity", thereby rapidly increasing the attractiveness and distinctiveness of Cuban agroecology.

Cubans are also replacing chemical and synthetic fertilizers with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, recycling the residues left-over from the processing of harvests, and pesticides are increasingly being replaced with polyculture, which are natural enemies against parasites and insect pests. Also, goats, horses and cows are increasingly being used as weed control rather than tractors that produce excessive carbon emissions and require massive effective inputs such as oil and gas, spare parts and additional transportation costs. [6] Cuban agriculture is premised on small-scale, diversified and locally integrated plots, animal husbandry, manure, seedlings and consumption. In fact, 60% of food distribution takes place through direct sales at thousands of sites of production, 22% is consumed by individual families and cooperatives, 11% is sold in state and 'open' markets, while the remaining portions are sold at reduced prices to, for example, schools and hospitals (Koont, 2009). This minimizes transportation costs, usage of machinery and protects against tumultuous weather and unforeseen crop failures. The ruling motto is, as Koont (2009, p.47) points out, "We must decentralize only up to a point where control is not lost, and centralize only up to a point where initiative is not killed". In fact, since moving away from Soviet-style state capitalist large-scale agriculture, Cuba has increased its production of vegetables and herbs from 4000-tons to 4.2-million-tons between 1994 and 2005. Moreover, in combining rural, suburban and urban farming and using biological and natural forms of pest control, Cubans have been able to diminish the distinction between town and country, mental and manual labour, as well as the 'modern' and the 'backwards'. Finally, special programs have been developed that aim to protect fragile mangroves along the coast, resist desertification, and integrate development of rural and mountainous regions.

Of course, concerns over food shortages and restrictions do arise for Cubans now and then, however few have illusions about the offer on the table 150km north of Varadero. The repudiation of liberal political polyarchy, market-based solutions to social determinants of health and corporate oligarchy, and the questioning of the benefits and disadvantages of new technologies (such as genetically-modified organisms) are radically different principles from which Cuban social policy departs. As opposed to envisaging infinite economic growth as an end in itself, Cuban socialism prioritizes human needs and the sustainability of the biosphere as is evidenced by such regional agreements as the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (see Kellogg, 2006; Fanelli, 2008). "In recent years" suggest Panitch and Gindin (2009, Np.),

we have seen all too many disillusioned people on the left "coming to their senses" by abandoning the goal of socialism. Some have succumbed to a post-modernist pessimism, which has indeed proved to be a 'paralysis per se'... But overcoming that pessimism is not a matter of asserting a new, yet equally short-sighted optimism. Rather, it means drawing inspiration from the continuity between the utopian dream that pre-dates socialism and the concrete popular struggles in evidence around the world as people strive, in a multitude of diverse ways, to assert their humanity. It means drawing encouragement from the activist left's broadening of its political project to encompass many of the ideals [set out above].

Socialism, then, as Marx and Engels argued in the German Ideology (1932, p.57), is not a "state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself...but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things". Periods of insecurity and uncertainty are especially moments for potential radical social transformation. The objective is to supersede the redistributive program of 'Third Way' progressivism and go beyond piecemeal reforms, which purport to keep the existing social system and design of the state intact.

"Escaping that debilitating trap", suggests Gindin (2009, Np.), "which involves being truly realistic would mean learning to think and act in fresher, bigger and more radical ways". This includes a movement away from professional NGOs navigating the grant economy and towards expanding the union movement to both the waged and unwaged, while undoing the corporate-bureaucratic alliance that characterizes the current impasse of the union movement (Albo, 2009; Rosenfeld, 2009). So long as the ability to transform our lives is left to the devices of markets, competition and profits, as opposed to democratic social planning to meet collective needs and wants, a society supportive of solidarity and equality as it pertains to race, class, gender, sexuality and religion will remain stuck between hell and a hot place. Continuing ecological degradation and attacks against labour so as to increase the appropriation of surplus-value will likely continue as long as that old pecking order introduced by Comte - which sees the study of atoms as superior to molecules, which is superior to the study of cells over organisms, which is superior to populations and so on (Levins, 2008b) - impresses upon students, activists and scholars the need to 'be realistic', 'narrow down your research to key policy debates' and take the existing social relations as 'natural'.

If food crises, environmental decay and deteriorating access to healthcare, education and modest living standards, not to mention quality-of-life, continue to grow this will mean that social relations in totality will need to be fundamentally - if not revolutionarily - rethought: living and working arrangements will have to be redesigned; consumption and travel practices reassessed; homes will likely have to be modified and productive machinery and factories altered; there will need to be massive infrastructural reorganization of energy, transport and manufacturing; the urban/rural divide will have to be integrated with a particular focus on the massive slums throughout both the global north and south; food and water sovereignty recognized as a fundamental human right; and the global commons such as the air, oceans and forests vehemently protected. Broader ambitions include the replacement of the 'private welfare state' with democratically administered, universal public programs, which put the needs of the earth's inhabitants ahead of corporate profitability; the nationalization of banks and finance, since the state acts as lender of last resort anyways, which would ensure that everyone shares in the equitable distribution of the social surplus product through democratically run bodies; communities organized so as to ensure their rights to decent jobs, safe and healthy living arrangements and substantive environmental policies which put the needs of the neighbourhoods and cities first; schools, universities, cultural centres and public spaces radically reclaimed by the general populace, which would promote the capacity of individuals to discover common needs and interests with others, thereby encouraging the formation of collective identities, associations and the related abilities to develop the means and resources to determine collectively how those needs and interests be fulfilled. Lastly, a sharp movement away from the debilitating cynicism which cripples the imagination, represses common aspirations and dismissively regards alternative social forms of organization as utopian.

On this point it is crucial to stress that for more than 50-years the US have funded and supported terrorist attacks, bombings, military-invasions, sanctions, embargoes, isolation, threats, assassination attempts and espionage against many so-called rogue (read incompliant) states, and especially Cuba (Blum, 2001). The question will forever remain what kind of society could Cubans have produced if left to their own devices, without the ever-present fear of invasion and attacks, if Cuba had not been across the Florida Strait from the Empire? Today, more than 50-years after the revolution, Cuba continues to aid in the struggle against really-existing barbarism everywhere. To borrow from currently fashionable jargon, not only have Cubans generated "hope" and shown that "yes, we can", but they have feverishly backed up the rhetoric with substantive changes. To borrow from an unlikely marketing campaign for Adidas, whose original source is unknown but attributed to Richard Bullock:

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

Carlo Fanelli is currently a PhD candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in the Department of Sociology/Political Economy.

Endnotes

1. Also known as 'Our Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security'.

2. See for example Bello (2009); Magdoff & Tokar (2009).

3. Socialism for Levins (2008c), 388, with whom I agree, in its broadest sense "refers to a society in which the associated producers (past, present and future workers) own most of the means of production locally or nationally, in cooperative or state enterprises, and make the decisions about society through combined participatory and representative democracy (both state and non-state). Production is decided on the basis of judgments about human needs, distribution is according to work and need, and labour power is not a marketable commodity. Within this framework many kinds of organization and ways of working have been and are being tested".

4. Cuba's pharmaceutical, biomedical and healthcare advancements are internationally renowned and recognized. Compared with 1958 which had approximately one doctor for every 1,100 people, today there is approximately 1/155 compared with 1/300 in Western Europe and 1/417 in the US which, unlike elsewhere, are all free of charge and truly dispersed geographically. As a percentage of GDP, Cuban health care spending represents about 7%, which is equivalent to roughly $251 (US dollars) per person (WHO, 2007a) - hardly enough to fix a cavity in most countries of the Global North. When one compares this with the US at 14% of GDP, which does not provide universal and free health care but minimally-funded public health care programs, health and vitality rates between the two countries are nearly parallel aside from, of course, the incredible sums reaped by pharmaceutical companies. And, in developing closer relations with their Latin American, African, Middle-Eastern and Asian counterparts in the Global South, Cuba has developed an exchange program that allows foreigners to study in Cuban medical schools absolutely free of charge and is actually training more doctors than the entire US combined, where graduates carry an average burden of $140,000 upon graduation. Lastly, Cuba exports more doctors and healthcare staff worldwide than the entire WHO combined (see Fanelli, 2008; Alarcon, 2009; Brouwer, 2009).

5. Literacy rates, which were barely above the 25-35% mark in 1958, are upwards of 98% today.

6. Cuba leads the world in active compliance with the environmental agendas of Rio and Kyoto, nearly all urban vegetable production and approximately half the total food production is organic, and Freon is being replaced in refrigerators with a Cuban-developed natural substitute derived from sugar cane (Levins, 2008c).

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