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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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AN
INTERVIEW WITH:
SIMPATICO LINKS:
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September 2003, Volume 55 — Number 4 c o n t
e n t s It took only a few months following the
official ending of the Iraq War for U.S. imperial designs to unravel almost
completely. The Bush administration is now under fire from the intelligence
community, the media, and the political elites for having lied its way into the
war with its claims regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. More damaging
still to administration plans, occupying troops and their Iraqi collaborators
are being killed on an almost daily basis in what is now taking on the
appearance of a classic guerilla war. This would be impossible without the
support offered to the insurgents by substantial sections of the Iraqi
population. Consequently, the United States is being compelled to maintain
larger numbers of forces than anticipated in Iraq (often by extending the
duration in which military units remain in the country) and the projected term
of U.S. military occupation is being drawn out. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH Harry Magdoff sat down to talk in front of a video camera in April 2003, three weeks before the conference “Imperialism Today” sponsored by Monthly Review in honor of his ninetieth birthday. An edited version of his remarks would be shown on a large screen at the start of the conference. But Harry has much to say that will be left on the cutting room floor, not because it lacks relevance, but because the time for the video is short, and a good portion of it will be devoted to how he became a socialist. Here, then, are Harry’s thoughts on capitalism, imperialism, the United States—and Iraq. (Note: the transcript of the interview was edited in July 2003 under Harry’s supervision to fill in a number of details.) The Venezuelan Military: Led by Hugo Chávez, a former military officer, a "Bolivarian revolutionary process" has been underway in Venezuela since Chavez's election to the presidency in 1998. While genuine progressive changes have been made, and although Chavez has won the enmity of the country's rich and powerful, this "Bolivarian revolution" has been rejected by some on the left because it is headed by a military man and because the military has played a significant and prominent role in numerous state institutions and government plans. The reason for this rejection is the standard left wisdom that the military is an integral part of the bourgeois state's repressive machinery, imbued with a bourgeois ideology, and therefore incapable of playing a revolutionary role in a capitalist society. Popular Struggle in Argentina: I spent May 2003 in Argentina visiting factories, working-class suburbs, villas de miseria (impoverished housing of unemployed squatters), lower middle-class assemblies in the cities, social centers of the unemployed, and universities. I interviewed trade unionists, unemployed workers, student and faculty activists, human rights activists, film and video makers, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, writers, doctors, journalists, and Marxist and center-left political leaders. This was my thirty-eighth year of visiting, studying, and giving talks in Argentina. I spent most of my time in greater Buenos Aires and in Neuquen Province, where Argentina's foremost ceramic factory was taken over by its workers and is now run through a system of democratic self-management. Capitalism and
Incarceration Revisited “Capitalism and Incarceration,” written by the author and published in Monthly Review twenty years ago (March 1983), analyzed the relationship between the capitalist economy and the prison system in America and came to an indisputable conclusion… The Inhuman State
of U.S. Health Care The health sector of the United States is in profound disarray. Even though the United States spends more on health care (14 percent of its GNP) than any other country, we still have problems that no other developed capitalist country faces. Let me list some of them. The first and most overwhelming problem is that no less than forty-four million of our people have no form of health benefits coverage whatsoever. The majority of them are working people, and their children, who cannot afford to pay the health insurance premium that would enable them to get care in time of need. Many of them work for small companies that cannot or will not pay their part of the health insurance premium. Because these individuals cannot pay for insurance, they do not get needed care, and many die as a consequence. The most credible estimate of the number of people in the United States who have died because of lack of medical care was provided by a study carried out by Professors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler (New England Journal of Medicine 336, no. 11 [1997]). They concluded that almost 100,000 people died in the United States each year because of lack of needed care—three times the number of people who died of AIDs. It is important to note here that while the media express concern about AIDs, they remain almost silent on the topic of deaths due to lack of medical care. Any decent person should be outraged by this situation. How can we call the United States a civilized nation when it denies the basic human right of access to medical care in time of need? No other major capitalist country faces such a horrendous situation.
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