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» » Can the Working Class Change the
World? A Turn for the Worse in the United
States: Criminalizing Dissent Dr. Baburam Bhattarai on the Failure of the Peace Talks in Nepal Remembering W.E.B. Du Bois Fidel Castro: May Day Rally
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November 2004, Volume 56 — Number 6 c o n t
e n t s What was the principal motive for the
U.S. invasion of Iraq? Few informed observers now believe that it was to
eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Months before the war in December
2002 we wrote in these pages: "Iraq today probably does not possess
functional chemical and biological war capabilities since these were
effectively destroyed during the UN inspection process in 1991-1998." In
early October 2004 Charles Duelfer, the CIA's top weapons inspector, officially
confirmed in a 918-page report delivered to two Congressional committees that
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. All
such "capabilities," his report indicated, had been destroyed or had
simply "decayed" as a result of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent
UN weapons inspection process. Of course even if it had been shown that Iraq
had such weapons prior to the war this would not have justified the U.S.
invasion, since numerous countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have
weapons of mass destruction with the United States as the world leader in the
possession (and use) of such weapons. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH DENNIS SORON: Many environmentalists came away from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with a great deal of optimism, believing that the cause of global environmental reform had finally been seriously placed on the political agenda. Today, with environmental conditions continuing to worsen and governments refusing to take effective action, it seems that little of this optimism remains. Why did the hopes spawned at Rio turn out to be so misplaced? JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: The optimism coming out of Rio was misplaced largely because environmental groups were not really contemplating the economic forces arrayed against them or considering how fundamentally the capitalist economic system is geared toward environmental degradation. U.S. Imperialism,
Europe, and the Middle East The analysis proposed here regarding the role of Europe and the Middle East in the global imperialist strategy of the United States is set in a general historical vision of capitalist expansion that I have developed elsewhere.* In this view capitalism has always been, since its inception, by nature, a polarizing system, that is, imperialist. This polarization-the concurrent construction of dominant centers and dominated peripheries, and their reproduction deepening in each stage-is inherent in the process of accumulation of capital operating on a global scale. After the
Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges With President Hugo Chávez's victory in the August 15 referendum, the Venezuelan opposition suffered the third great defeat in its struggle to end his government. The unprecedented recall referendum ratified Chávez's presidency by a margin of two million votes and was declared valid unanimously by the hundreds of international observers who scrutinized it. In a part of the world where democracy has been discredited by its failure to solve the problem of poverty, the result provided, in the words of one observer, Eduardo Galeano, "an injection of optimism." The Greening of Venezuela With all the hullabaloo about Chávez's alleged authoritarianism, opposition strikes and demonstrations, and a possible recall referendum, you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing constructive is being done in Venezuela and that the nation's energies are entirely absorbed by political mud-slinging. Indeed, that's just what the corporate media would like you to think. The
Disciplinary Apparatus of Welfare Reform In 1996 President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), to end "welfare as we know it." PRWORA, euphemistically referred to as "welfare to work" or simply "welfare reform," has fundamentally changed the status of women within U.S. capitalism. Historically, women's roles in the sexual division of labor have been to reproduce the laborer (cook and keep house) and reproduce the labor force (have children). If women had to work in the formal labor force, then society demanded that they hold jobs appropriate to their gender. There has always been a gender-based social discipline of women whether they were wage earners or homemakers. It is interesting to note that still today beauty contests, sexual harassment, and compulsory use of birth control pills are all forms of discipline enforced on women in many third world factories. Of course, sexual harassment is common in the workplaces of the rich capitalist countries as well. POETRY Tonight as cargoes of my young |
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