December 2009,
Volume 61, Number 7

c o n t e n t s
»notes from the editors

In this issue we are reprinting C. Wright Mills’s “Psychology and Social Science” from the October 1958 issue of Monthly Review. The argument of this piece was subsequently incorporated in Mills’s Sociological Imagination, which appeared fifty years ago this year, and constituted a powerful indictment of mainstream social science. Both “Psychology and Social Science” and the larger Sociological Imagination were strongly influenced by “the principle of historical specificity” as described in Karl Korsch’s Karl Marx. Mills used this to construct a radical challenge to the prevailing notion of a permanent “human nature,” applicable to all societies and social situations. He later referred to The Sociological Imagination — in a letter to an imaginary Soviet correspondent (part of a work he was writing, to be called Letter to a Russian Intellectual) — as “a kind of ‘Anti-Duhring,’” constituting his radical break with ahistorical social science… | more |

Review of the Month:
Seize the Crisis!
Samir Amin

The principle of endless accumulation that defines capitalism is synonymous with exponential growth, and the latter, like cancer, leads to death. John Stuart Mill, who recognized this, imagined that a “stationary state of affairs” would put an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of Reason. But neither was equipped to understand how the necessary overcoming of capitalism could prevail. By contrast, Marx, by giving proper importance to the emerging class struggle, could imagine the reversal of power of the capitalist class, concentrated today in the hands of the ruling oligarchy…

The Vulnerable Planet Fifteen Years Later
John Bellamy Foster

The original intent of The Vulnerable Planet,when it was first published fifteen years ago, was to provide a brief historical materialist analysis of the development of the global ecological crisis, beginning with the early civilizations and leading up to the monopoly capitalist society of the late twentieth century. Looking back now at the book as it was originally written—and at the second edition published five years later, incorporating a few minor changes plus an afterword—I see no major point on which the analysis has proven to be substantially wrong or where it needs significant revision. Nevertheless, the last decade and a half has witnessed an acceleration of history with respect to the human relation to the environment, adding force to the concerns that the book expressed…

The Assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago Police, Forty Years Later
An interview with Jeffrey Haas

Civil rights lawyer Jeffrey Haas, a founder, in 1969, of Chicago’s People’s Law Office, has written one of the top books of the year: The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009). The story could not be more worth telling. Police response to the 1960s upsurge of the black community was immediate and brutal, especially after the growth of a mass student and youth movement opposed to the Vietnam War. The FBI, as the leading U.S. secret police force, engaged in a nationwide campaign of provocation, infiltration, and assassination, code named the Counterintelligence Program, or “COINTELPRO.” The resulting murders, on December 4, 1969, of charismatic, twenty-one-year-old Chicago Black Panther state chairman Fred Hampton and twenty-two-year-old Black Panther Mark Clark were a pivotal event in the suppression of militant black resistance and the emergence of today’s U.S. police/prison state. The gradual collapse of the Nixon presidency and public outcry against White House-ordered burglaries opened a window permitting the exposure of secret police crimes, including the Hampton assassination. Jeffrey Haas and his partners at the People’s Law Office made good use of this opportunity through determined and creative litigation, and uncovered the story recounted in his book. But the window was slammed shut in succeeding years, and was finally removed entirely—to be replaced by the blank prison wall of the USA Patriot Act. Hampton’s story is no longer primarily a U.S. concern, but one that affects everyone in the world. It is the story of the path to Abu Ghraib. We interviewed Jeffrey Haas in late September 2009.

Farmers, Mao, and Discontent in China
Dongping Han

There are widespread misconceptions about numerous aspects of the Chinese revolution. These include a misreading of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the “reforms” of the post-Mao era, and the reaction of the overwhelming mass of the peasantry to these movements. Although the revolutionary programs/movements resulted in significant hardships—on the rural population (the Great Leap Forward, 1958-61) or the intellectuals (the Cultural Revolution, 1966-76)—they both produced concrete achievements in the countryside that led to impressive gains in agricultural production and in people’s lives. In contrast, the post-Mao era “reforms” have resulted so far in a huge growth of inequality in China, with the rural population suffering greatly by the dismantling of public support for health and education. In addition, local and regional officials have sold farmland for development purposes, usually lining their own pockets, with inadequate compensation for the farmers. This has resulted in the current massive unrest in rural areas, involving literally hundreds of thousands of incidents with protesting farmers…

Reprise:
Psychology and Social Science
C. Wright Mills

Social scientists want to understand not only social structure and history; they want to understand the varieties of individual men and women that are historically selected and formed by the social structures in which they live. The biographies of these people cannot be understood without reference to the historical structures in which are organized the milieux of their everyday lives. It is now possible to trace the meanings of historic transformations not only for individual ways of life but for the very characters of a variety of human beings. As the history-making unit, the nation-state is also the unit within which types of men and women are formed: it is the man-making unit. That is one reason why struggle between nations and between blocs of nations is also struggle over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related, and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination. The problems of social and historical psychology are in many ways the most intriguing that we can today confront. For it is in this area, it happens, that the major intellectual traditions of our time, in fact of Western civilization, have now come to a most exciting confluence…

Review:
Cancer and Cold War Capitalism
Susan M. Chambré

Ellen Leopold, Under the Radar: Cancer and the Cold War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 312 pages, $25.95, hardcover.

Health policy histories, like Under the Radar, are especially timely during the current debate about how to reform the U.S. health care system. They provide significant insights into the myriad cultural, social, political, and economic forces that have shaped the U.S. health care system. They also guide policy by identifying the challenges that may serve as barriers to enacting needed reforms…

Review:
Got Gas?
Mark Thomas Belches Out the Coca-Cola Company

Mark Thomas, Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola (New York: Nation Books, 2008), 365 pages, $16.95, paperback.

Midway through his courageous and engaging book, Belching Out the Devil, Mark Thomas becomes intrigued by an offer on a Coke Web site, “If you want to know the truth about the Coca-Cola Company: Ask the farmer in India.…”