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February 2006, Volume 57 — Number 9 c o n t
e n t s The victory of Evo Morales, presidential candidate of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), in Bolivia’s December elections was a world-historical event of the first order. Its extent was unexpected, certainly by us. Morales won well over 50 percent of the vote. He vanquished his closest rival, former president Jorge Quiroga (the favorite of international capital) by a margin of more than 20 percentage points. Morales openly opposes neoliberalism and U.S. coca eradication policies, insists on national control of Bolivia’s natural gas and other natural resources, and promises to aid those at the bottom of the society. Bolivia is currently the poorest nation in South America, but it has the second largest natural gas reserves on the continent.| more |. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH The physicist Alan Sokal laid a trap for postmodernists and anti-science scholars on the academic left when he submitted his article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to Social Text, a left-leaning cultural studies journal. The trap sprang when the journal unwittingly published the article in its 1996 spring/summer issue. The article was intended to parody the type of scholarship that has become common in some sectors of the academy, which substitutes word-play and sophistry for reason and evidence. Sokal purposefully included in his article a variety of false statements, illogical arguments, incomprehensible sentences, and absurd, unsupported assertions, including the claim that there was in effect no real world and all of science was merely a social construction. He submitted the article to test whether the editors of Social Text had any serious intellectual standards. They failed the test, and the scandal that ensued has become legend… The NAFTA
Corridors: Offshoring U.S. Transportation Jobs to Mexico Capital’s relentless search for cheap labor constantly alters the flow of surface transportation in North America with widespread consequences. The end-of-century deindustrialization of the United States and importation of cheap commodities from the Far East through the West Coast reversed historical east-west transportation patterns and established Los Angeles and Long Beach as the largest ports in the nation. To minimize transportation costs, which for many products are higher than the cost of production, intermodal transportation of containerized imports was developed. Manufactured goods are packed into mobile shipping containers at factories in the Far East and travel by ship, train, and truck to distribution centers and, ultimately, consumer outlets across the United States. Currently, intermodal transportation of cheap imported commodities is the lifeline of the American economy. In 2004, the Port of Los Angeles processed 7.3 million container units and Long Beach handled 5.8 million. These two ports alone accounted for 68 percent of the West Coast total and are, by far, the largest employers in California. U.S. workers, who have seen so many lucrative manufacturing jobs moved overseas, assumed that import transportation and distribution jobs could not be offshored and were, therefore, relatively secure. NEW THIS WEEK! On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as “a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates.” It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as “indecent” and announced that Nelson Mandela will be hosting a People's Forum on Saturday morning in Inanda to hear the views of residents in informal settlements....The ANC calls on all people living in informal settlements to make their voices heard! “Your problems are my problems. Your solution is my solution.” says President Mandela… BOOK
REVIEWS A review of The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in Californiaby Richard A. Walker. Planting
Seeds A review of To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia by Eve S. Weinbaum. 
THE OPTIMISM OF THE HEART: January 2006, Volume 57, Number
8 c o n t
e n t s The United States is currently engaged in what the media—with no trace of irony—is calling "the national debate on torture." With the White House adamantly rejecting Senator John McCain's amendment to ban U.S. use of torture, the morality of torture has suddenly become something that can be openly and respectably "argued." Not only are certain torture techniques advocated on the grounds of their utility (see for example the November 30, 2005, column "Tortured Logic" by Jonah Goldberg, online editor for the National Review), but the executive branch is presenting arguments in court against releasing the latest photos of torture by U.S. operatives—on the grounds that public viewing of these photos would undermine the war effort. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been visiting European heads of state in early December 2005. Her diplomatic mission: to defend the present U.S. practice of stealing away "terror suspects" and taking them to undisclosed secret prisons in Europe and elsewhere for intensive interrogation and torture. For those seeking a grasp of the full moral and political dimensions of the current U.S. torture regime we strongly recommend the new Monthly Review Press book The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Mediaby Lila Rajiva. Not only does Rajiva expose the reality of U.S. torture of prisoners, she also uncovers the media's complicity in legitimating such practices.| more |. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH Today's imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question then arises: How is this new imperial age conceived by those promoting it? What Will We Do?:
The Destruction of Occupational Identities in the ‘Knowledge-Based
Economy’ Faced with the difficulty of "placing" a stranger, the most common opening gambit is to ask, "What do you do?" Except perhaps in a few small hunter-gatherer tribes, a person's occupation is one of the most important delineators of social identity. In many European cultures this is reflected in family names. People called Schmidt, Smith, Herrero, or Lefebvre, for instance, had ancestors who were iron workers. Wainwrights and Wagners are descended from wagon makers, and so on with the Mullers (Millers), Boulangers (Bakers), Guerreros (soldiers), and all the myriad Potters, Butchers, Carters, Coopers, Carpenters, Fishers, Shepherds, and Cooks whose names can be found in any North American phone book. What Was the
Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic? BOOK
REVIEWS A review of Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America's Cold War by John Hoerr. Lost and
Found: The Italian-American Radical Experience A review of The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture by Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds. |
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