Articles

Notes from the Editors, December 2006

by The Editors

December 1, 2006

In a survey of the Iraqi population, the results of which were released last June, 76 percent of those surveyed gave as their first choice "to control Iraqi oil" when asked to choose three reasons that the United States invaded Iraq. The next most common answers were "to build military bases" and "to help Israel." Less than 2 percent picked "to bring democracy to Iraq" as their first choice (University of Michigan News Service, June 14, 2006 [http://www.nsumich.edu], U.S. News & World Report, August 17, 2006). In the United States the "blood for oil" explanation for the war is regularly scorned by the powers that be, including the corporate media. However, there is no way of getting around the fact that nearly all questions regarding Iraq return in one way or another to oil

Monopoly-Finance Capital

by John Bellamy Foster

December 1, 2006

The year now ending marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Compared to mainstream economic works of the early to mid-1960s (the most popular and influential of which were John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom), Monopoly Capital stood out not simply in its radicalism but also in its historical specificity. What Baran and Sweezy sought to explain was not capitalism as such, the fundamental account of which was to be found in Marx's Capital, but rather a particular stage of capitalist development. Their stated goal was nothing less than to provide a brief "essay-sketch" of the monopoly stage of capitalism by examining the interaction of its basic economic tendencies, narrowly conceived, with the historical, political, and social forces that helped to shape and support them

The Myths of ‘Democracy Assistance’: U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

by Gerald Sussman

December 1, 2006

One of the notable shifts in post-Soviet world politics is the almost unimpeded involvement of Western agents, consultants, and public and private institutions in the management of national election processes around the world—including those in the former Soviet allied states. As communist party apparatuses in those countries began to collapse by the late 1980s and in almost bloodless fashion gave way to emerging political forces, the West, especially the United States, was quick to intercede in their political and economic affairs. The methods of manipulating foreign elections have been modified since the heyday of CIA cloak and dagger operations, but the general objectives of imperial rule are unchanged. Today, the U.S. government relies less on the CIA in most cases and more on the relatively transparent initiatives undertaken by such public and private organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, George Soros's Open Society, and a network of other well-financed globetrotting public and private professional political organizations, primarily American, operating in the service of the state's parallel neoliberal economic and political objectives. Allen Weinstein, who helped establish NED, noted: "A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."

Beyond Liberal Globalization: A Better or Worse World?

by Samir Amin

December 1, 2006

The CIA (together with its associated intelligence organizations) gathers an unparalleled mass of information of all kinds on all the world's countries. However, its analysis of this material is banal in the extreme. This is undoubtedly because its leaders cannot see beyond their imperialist prejudices or their Anglo-Saxon worldview and lack critical interest and imagination

Socialism and the Knowledge Economy: Cuban Biotechnology

by Agustín Lage Dávila

December 1, 2006

As authoritatively stated in an editorial in Nature, vol. 436, issue 7049 (July 2005), "Cuba has developed a considerable [scientific] research capability—perhaps more so than any other developing country outside of Southeast Asia." Cuba has been especially successful in establishing a biotechnology industry that has effectively introduced drugs and vaccines of its own, along with a nascent pharmaceutical industry that has achieved considerable success in exports. Its agriculture and health sectors have been strong beneficiaries of its scientific research. As Nature observed: "It is worth asking how Cuba did it, and what lessons other countries might draw from it." Indeed, the Cuban case is all the more surprising since it is not only a poor country, but one that has been confronted for decades by a ruthless embargo imposed by the United States, which has been extended to scientific knowledge. Moreover, much of Cuba's scientific progress has occurred in the decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union, which previously had aided it economically and technologically

Notes from the Editors, November 2006

by The Editors

November 1, 2006

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez's extraordinary speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September drew worldwide media attention not simply because he referred to the current occupant of the White House as "the devil" for his nefarious actions as the leader of world imperialism, but also because of his scarcely less heretical praise of MR and MR Press author Noam Chomsky for his book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. As the foremost dissident intellectual in the United States, Chomsky is generally ostracized by the dominant U.S. media system, treated as a ghost-like or even non-existent figure. The establishment was thus caught off guard when Chávez's comments suddenly catapulted Hegemony or Survival into the bestseller list, along with another recent Chomsky book, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. The speed with which orders for Chomsky's books piled up in bookstores and Internet distributors across the nation demonstrated beyond any doubt that people are hungry for serious radical critiques of U.S. imperialism but seldom know where to look—since all such dissident views are deemed off limits by the ruling media-propaganda system

The Explosion of Debt and Speculation

by Fred Magdoff

November 1, 2006

In a series of articles in Monthly Review and in Monthly Review Press books during the 1970s and 1980s, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy proposed that the general economic tendency of mature capitalism is toward stagnation. A shortage of profitable investment opportunities is the primary cause of this tendency. Less investment in the productive economy (the "real economy") means lower future growth. Marx wrote about the possibility of this very phenomenon

The Twilight of Personal Liberty: Introduction to ‘A Permanent State of Emergency’

by Michael E. Tigar

November 1, 2006

"The law is a mask that the state puts on when it wants to commit some indecency upon the oppressed." I put these words into the mouth of a character in my play "Haymarket: Whose Name the Few Still Say with Tears." Jean-Claude Paye has once again done us a service by showing how those words can come true. In theory, the bourgeois democratic state, as defined in the American constitution, was to operate under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle, elaborated more fully in the Bill of Rights, is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions

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