Volume 54, Number 6 | November 2002
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Volume 54, Number 6 | November 2002 |
» Newsletter » A Note from the Associate
Editor » About
MONTHLY REVIEW’S October 2002 September
2002 July-August 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February
2002 January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001
September 2001
July-August 2001 June 2001
May 2001
April 2001
March 2001 February
2001 Index to Back Issues
AN
INTERVIEW WITH: |
c o n t e n t s » On September 10, of this year, an
interview entitled, “Nelson Mandela: The U.S.A. is a Threat to World
Peace,” appeared as a Newsweek web exclusive,
http://www.msnbc.com/news/806174.asp.
In this interview, Mandela reviewed some of the history of U.S. interventions
in the Middle East—including U.S. support of the Shah of Iran, which led
to the Islamic revolution in 1979, and U.S. arming and financing of the
mujahedin in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of the Taliban. He went on to
say, “If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that
the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.
Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the
Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the
sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending the world.
That must be condemned in the strongest terms.” Later, on September 16,
when Washington condemned as mere duplicity Iraq’s offer to allow
unconditional inspection of its weapons facilities by U.N. inspectors, and
again threatened war, Mandela asked: “What right has Bush to say that
Iraq’s offer is not genuine? We must condemn that very strongly. No
country, however strong, is entitled to comment adversely in the way the U.S.
has done. They think they’re the only power in the world. They’re not
and they’re following a dangerous policy. One country wants to bully the
world” (Guardian, September 19, 2002). REVIEW
OF THE MONTH The concept of “imperialism” was considered outside the acceptable range of political discourse within the ruling circles of the capitalist world for most of the twentieth century. Reference to “imperialism” during the Vietnam War, no matter how realistic, was almost always a sign that the writer was on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 1971 foreword to the U.S. edition of Pierre Jalée’s Imperialism in the Seventies Harry Magdoff noted, “As a rule, polite academic scholars prefer not to use the term ‘imperialism.’ They find it distasteful and unscientific.” Stephen Jay
Gould—What Early this year, Stephen Gould developed lung cancer, which spread so quickly that there was no hope of survival. He died on May 20, 2002, at the age of sixty. Twenty years ago, he had escaped death from mesothelioma, induced, we all supposed, by some exposure to asbestos. Although his cure was complete, he never lost the consciousness of his mortality and gave the impression, at least to his friends, of an almost cheerful acceptance of the inevitable. Having survived one cancer that was probably the consequence of an environmental poison, he succumbed to another. Counter–Intelligent: The Surveillance and Indictment On June 14, 2000, radical attorney Lynne Stewart broke a signed agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. She released a press statement to the Reuters news service in Cairo on behalf of her imprisoned client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The statement said, in part, that the Sheikh, spiritual advisor to the fundamentalist Islamic Group [IG], wished to call off a cease-fire then observed in Egypt by the IG. Following this press release, the Clinton Justice Department admonished Stewart for violating the Special Administrative Measures [SAMs], which prohibited the Sheikh from communicating in any way with the outside world. Stewart admitted she had erred and signed the SAMs agreement again, assuming her work would proceed as usual. EXCHANGE In their April 2002 Review of the Month, Monthly Review's editors present a particularly clear statement of the view that the American economy, and with it global capitalism, has been stagnating since the early seventies and is now facing the threat of a financial crisis. It is our view that by focusing on the fragility of American capitalism and searching for data that provide evidence of the next and deeper economic crisis, the left tends to downplay the significance of the continuing capacity of American capital and the American state to restructure the world "in its own image." The left has, all too often, still not come to terms with the reconstitution of the American Empire that followed the crisis of the early seventies. Absorbed with confirming how crisis-prone capitalism is (no doubt in the expectation that this will make it easier for us to mobilize opposition to the system), the left has paid too little attention to the question of the capacity of the state to contain crises. 2. Crisis: One After Another for the Life
of the System Our disagreement with our friends, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, is over three interrelated issues: (1) how and why to analyze a crisis-prone capitalism, (2) the capacity of the state to manage or "contain" crises, and (3) the near-term prospects for capital accumulation. In addition there are significant divergences in empirical assessment between us related to these issues. |
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