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Speech The Sage of Imperialism: At 90, Harry Magdoff has Made His Marx by Susan Green » About RECENT ESSAYS ON: BACK ISSUES: April 2003 March 2003 February
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October 2003, Volume 55 — Number 5 c o n t
e n t s Samir Amin’s “World Poverty, Pauperization, and Capital
Accumulation,” the Review of the Month in this issue of MR, addresses
the growing phenomena of landlessness and pauperization among rural populations
in the periphery. He reminds us that half of the people in the world are
peasants, a group largely unseen by liberals and radicals. The dispossession of
the peasantry throughout the third world represents one of the central problems
of our time—for reasons of straightforward humanity. Amin points out that
the worsening position of the peasantry, their forced migration to cities, and
the growth of hunger among the poor cannot be adequately dealt with by treating
these problems as mere aberrations of the system. Mounting occasional
“anti-poverty” programs or “humanitarian” assistance or
even projects to enhance farm productivity offer no real long-term solutions.
In fact, the inherent contradictions in the third world are such that even
increases in the productivity of peasants so that more food is producedin the
absence of employment opportunities for rural labor that is no longer needed in
agriculture—can seriously worsen the problem of displacement and hunger!
The enormous humanitarian problem that Amin describes is rather a result of the
way capitalism works on a world scale. The clear lesson to be drawn from his
article is that the anti-globalization struggle needs to be aimed at the real
problem—the capitalist system. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH A discourse on poverty and the necessity of reducing its magnitude, if not eradicating it, has become fashionable today. It is a discourse of charity, in the nineteenth-century-style, which is does not seek to understand the economic and social mechanisms that generate poverty, although the scientific and technological means to eradicate it are now available. Calling Greenspan’s Bluff Too often Alan Greenspan is regarded by members of both parties as some kind of all-knowing sage, when in fact he is an extreme right-wing economist whose views on the minimum wage, trade, taxes, and other issues are directly at odds with the needs of working and middle-class Americans. I get sick and tired of hearing how well the economy is doing when so many are having a difficult time. It's time people start calling Greenspan's bluff, showing how out of touch he is with the working class of this country. So I have made it my job, when he comes before Congress twice a year, to reveal how “reactionary” he is. On that day I was particularly outraged by a remark he had made earlier, when asked about the huge loss of manufacturing jobs. Greenspan said something about how it was debatable whether it was harmful to lose those jobs. The State of
Welfare: The United States has the most regressive system of welfare for poor people among developed nations in the twenty-first century, and in recent years it has become even more punitive. The world’s self-professed leading democracy lacks a national health care policy, a universal right to health care, and a comprehensive family policy. Welfare applicants are subjected to personal intrusions, arcane regulations, and constant surveillance, all designed to humiliate recipients and deter potential applicants. In recent years there has been a significant decrease in cash grants to the unemployed and underemployed who do not qualify for unemployment insurance. The reorganization of the welfare state began under the Clinton administration with the devolution of federal policies to the states and massive cutting of welfare rolls. The Bush administration, while distracted by September 11 and imperial ambitions, has deepened the cuts and introduced important new policies facilitating access of private organizations to federal grants. The quickly changing economic and geopolitical climate has also generated a profound crisis in the ability of state and local agencies to provide adequate human services to the unemployed and growing ranks of impoverished citizens and immigrants. Leo Huberman: Radical
Agitator, Socialist Teacher This month marks the centennial of the birth of Leo Huberman, who, with Paul M. Sweezy, was founding coeditor of Monthly Review. Arguably without Huberman’s editorial and publishing skills, his radical imagination, and his indefatigable commitment to the idea of an independent, clear-sighted socialist clarion, MR might well have been stillborn. Instead, the magazine—and Monthly Review Press—became a leading voice of independent Marxian socialism both in the United States and worldwide. Much of this was due to the unique collaboration and friendship between Leo and Paul and to the larger MR “family” that included, initially, Gertrude Huberman (Leo’s wife, who died in 1965) and Sybil H. May, MR’s office manager until her death in October 1978. MR’s first office was in Leo and Gert’s Barrow Street apartment. It was there that the two editors would meet to plot the course of the magazine, shaping its worldview, enlisting its contributors, and deciding each issue’s contents. And it was there that Leo, especially, molded MR as an enterprise, a particularly risky task in those early years of the Cold War and witch-hunts. Latin America
& Underdevelopment This is a slightly abridged version of a speech delivered by Leo Huberman to the Methodist Student Christian Citizenship Seminar on Latin America,on February 4,1964. It is being published here for the first time. We would like to thank the University of Oregon Special Collections for providing access to this manuscript from their collection of Leo Huberman 's papers.We thank Elizabeth Huberman for her help in publishing this talk.Huberman's talk had no title.The present one is supplied by the editors. The Debs Way In 1912, as the Socialist Party’s candidate for President of the United States, Debs received over 897,000 votes. This was 6 percent of the total popular vote for the Presidency, or the equivalent of roughly 3 million votes in the 1948 election. Background Notes
to Fanshen On April 3, 1999, a one-day conference, “Understanding China’s Revolution: a Celebration of William Hinton’s Lifework” was held at Columbia University to celebrate his eightieth birthday. At the conclusion of the conference, organized by China Study Group and cosponsored by Monthly Review and Columbia’s East Asian Institute, Hinton gave an impromptu talk on the background to the writing of Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in A Chinese Village. The talk was transcribed and we publish its text here, as revised by Hinton in October 2002. POETRY "Pray for Peace" was first published in The Sun (June 2003). The Big Picture "The Big Picture" was first published in New Letters 69, no. 2/3 (2003).
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