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November 2007, Volume 59, Number 6 c o n t e n t s Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s new book The Age of Turbulence (Penguin 2007)set off a firestorm in mid-September with its dramatic statement on the Iraq War: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: that the Iraq war is largely about oil” (p. 463). The fact that someone of Greenspan’s stature in the establishment—one of the figures at the very apex of monopoly-finance capital—should issue such a twenty word statement, going against the official truths on the war, and openly voicing what “everyone knows,” was remarkable enough. Yet, his actual argument was far more significant, and since this has been almost completely ignored it deserves extended treatment here. | more |
Review of the Month: The glaring increase in economic inequality evident in the United States over the past thirty years has finally made it into the pages of the major media. In the past three years, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times have each published a series of articles on the subject of class. The growing economic divide has also caught the attention of a few prominent economists, like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Even Treasury secretary Henry Paulson has admitted that inequality is on the rise.
Gender and Mathematical Ability: The Toll of Biological Determinism In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir noted that “legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven” making use “of philosophy and theology.” When the ordained order from above fails as justification for explaining earthly relations, she pointed out, “antifeminists” draw upon “science—biology, experimental psychology, etc.”—as the means to naturalize inequalities. When challenged, they will claim that there is “‘equality of difference’ to the other sex”—innate differences in ability, but moral equality: the same formula that was used to justify racial discrimination through Jim Crow laws in the United States. This “equal but separate” logic, de Beauvoir contended, follows other forms of discrimination, “whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same.” Social inequalities and this ideology make it difficult “to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.” In order to overcome social inequalities between the sexes, she stressed, a critique of both the concrete conditions and the ideology that limit women’s liberty is necessary.
Remembering Che Guevera – 40 Years On 1. The Death and Life of Che By the time Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–67) was executed on October 8, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia by soldiers under the direction of an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had become a kind of ideological “fetish” for his Washington adversaries. For them Guevara was not simply some “terrorist” or “insurgent”—words used to describe him and his Cuban revolutionary comrades then, just as they are used to describe those who resist Western imperial designs today. He was something new in the context of the post-Second World War Cold War. The United States and its clients claimed they were engaged in a struggle to staunch “Soviet aggression”; Moscow saw itself as engaged in a contest of competing systems: capitalism versus socialism. But from the outset of his political life, Che’s perspective was burnished in and energized by the immiseration and oppression he confronted in the “Third World.” 2. Magic Death for a Magic Life I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for peoples who fight to free themselves, and I am consistent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am; but of a different kind—of those who risk their skins to test their truths. It may be that this will be the end. I don’t seek it, but it is within the logical calculus of probabilities. If it should be so, I send you a last embrace... When these lines, sent by Che Guevara to his parents a short time after his disappearance, reached Buenos Aires, his mother, Celia, was already dead. She had died without being able to communicate with her son. She didn’t receive this “last embrace,” this farewell which contained the premonition of the news that had just shaken the entire world. “In our difficult job of revolutionary, death is a frequent accident,” he had once written, on the occasion of the death of an intimate friend; his letter to the Tricontinental ends by greeting the death that will arrive, providing that it will give rise to “new cries of battle and victory.” A thousand times he said that to die was so very possible and, nevertheless, so very insignificant. He knew this very well: regarding his own successive deaths and resurrections, he himself asserted that he had seven lives.
Workplace Democracy and Collective Consciousness: An Empirical Study of Venezuelan Cooperatives Liberal ideology insists that a society in which conscious solidarity is the dominating attitude/approach is impossible, because humans are primarily and perpetually motivated by individual material incentives. But the revolutionary process that Venezuela embarked upon in 1999, known as the “Bolivarian Revolution,” is challenging the core liberal tenet that narrow self-interest is the immutable human condition.
From Borderline to Borderland: The Changing European Border Regime All along the European border, the year 2006 set new records: Spanish authorities reported 6,000 refugees dead, drowned in the Atlantic Ocean while trying to reach the Canary Islands, off West Africa.1 Hundreds more suffocated in containers, trucks, and cargo boats in the ports of London, Dublin, and Rotterdam, or froze to death in Eastern Europe. Others, locked up in one of the innumerable internment camps spread all over the heart of Europe and North Africa, desperately decided to end their own lives.2 At the same time, Europe reported the lowest rate in years of refugees officially seeking asylum. This list obviously doesn’t point to a more peaceful world. What it indicates instead is that in Europe the criteria and procedures for securing legal refugee status have become so restrictive that most migrants no longer bother to apply for it. In 2006, Germany for example counted only 20,000 petitions for political asylum, the lowest number since 1977. If we include the member states of the European Union (EU), that number rises to 200,000.3 However, the real story of the border regime, and its constriction of the category for legal entrance and residence, is in the rising body count.
A New Stage in Capitalism's War on the Planet The introduction to this book, the last part to be completed, was sent to the printer in New York City only days before the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and was first published in October 2001 in Monthly Review. Since then the world has witnessed a continuing war by the United States for control of the oil-rich Middle East and an acceleration of the global ecological crisis—symbolized above all by global warming. The opening years of the twenty-first century can therefore be viewed as marking a new stage in the war of capitalism on the planet.
Review: Nepal's Geography of Underdevelopment Emerging from a middle-peasant family background in Nepal, Baburam Bhattarai excelled at school and then, with a Colombo Plan scholarship in hand, studied architecture and planning in India. By the early to middle 1980s, the theoretical structure of spatial and regional planning studies had changed—in a Marxist direction. Bhattarai wrote his doctoral dissertation at one of the centers of political-theoretical ferment—the Centre for Study of Regional Development, at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi—finishing in 1986. While he was a student, Bhattarai was president of the All India Nepalese Students Association on its founding in 1977. He joined the illegal Communist Party of Nepal (Masal) in the early 1980s. Returning to his native Nepal in 1986, he was the spokesperson of the United National People’s Movement during the 1990 uprising, and from 1991 the Coordinator of the United People’s Front Nepal, the legal front of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre), which in turn gave birth in 1995 to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN[M]). Bhattarai served prominently in the Peoples’ War 1996–2006, and is now de facto second in command of the CPN(M). As of the date of writing preparatory negotiations for Constituent Assembly elections are still taking place, with the fate of the monarchy and the future direction of Nepalese society to be decided in the continuing struggle.
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