Reviews for Advanced immunology

The average rating for Advanced immunology based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-31 00:00:00 Jeff Holzimn In Looting Africa Patrick Bond basically updates Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa While Africa is often portrayed in global media as the hapless beneficiary of well intentioned aid and charitable campaigns Bond emphasizes the many ways wealth is pulled out of the continent through dividend and debt payments,unequal exchange, brain drains and such Aid is often a poisoned chalice that comes with demands that markets be opened to Western economic interests The same is true of much ballyhooed debt relief China recent involvement in Africa is portrayed no more sympathetically China cuts deals with exploitative rulers and uses Chinese workers on projects like oil refineries Bond also emphasizes the collaboration of African elites in the neoliberal plunder--South Africa economically exploits its neighbors while NEPAD locks Africa into neoliberalism Although he occasionally sympathetically quotes NGO reports for the most part he believes that grassroots social movements are the only real hope for change It is this final point that I think is the weakest in the book. Although there is certainly some truth to the notion that a politics that seeks to genuinely promote the social good is going to be grounded among the people with nothing to lose in the current system I think its a strategic mistake to flatten the politics of all other actors into a single exploitative neoliberalism at most talks left walks right (as he argues was the case with Mandela opposition to the Iraq war while the ANC allowed the US to use South Africa in some ways to support the war) This is basically a politics of failing to see anything short of a revolutionary rejection of the system as a fraud I think its short sighted and will lead to a confused strategy Bond sees South Africa along with Brazil and India as an example of sub-imperialism but an argument can be made that these sub-powers look both ways sometimes aligning themselves with the West (which is itself not as unified as Bond believes) sometimes aligning themselves with the interests of poorer countries They are in-between politically ambiguous. Bond takes his position to the logical extreme and even heaps a certain amount of opprobrium on the World Social Forum since it was started by a social democratic party in Brazil in alignment with intellectuals in Europe But the WSF has clearly opened space for the networking of the kind of movements he admires worldwide Notwithstanding his (I think positive)calls to listen to movements I think there is a certain vanguardist tone to his political stance Movements from South Africa to the US are often hesitant (far more hesitant than far-left intellectuals) to break completely with pusillanimous ruling liberals for precisely the reasons outlined above because they allow a little bit of space to advance their projects Bond might want to listen to this a little rather than demand the movements immediately achieve a level of militancy he has deemed necessary for their goals

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-28 00:00:00 Kimberly Gilbert This was a good review of the politics of exploitation perpetrated by outside actors and their accomplices. I'm moderating my star level because I felt that the narrative flow was disrupted by too much emphasis on statements and proclamations by NGOs and other authors, whereas Bond's own view was most compelling.