October 1, 2000
Khalil Hassan's contribution to your July/August 2000 issue (“The Future of the Labor Left”) attempts to categorize leftwing union activists based on their past or present relationship to “the labor bureaucracy ”
�October 1, 2000
“Oh no, not another great, thick, fat book on Marx!” thought Richard Lewontin when he saw this new book by John Bellamy Foster. I have to confess (despite the fact that I, too, have written a big book on Marxism) to a similar reaction. However, as he goes on to say in the book's blurb, “as soon as I started to read, I found it hard to put down.” With this, too, I concur
October 1, 2000
Hugh Deane has written a concise, political, and engaging history of the Korean war. One reason this book is special is that Deane was in southern Korea during the late 1940s as a reporter, and his experiences there enable him to provide a more immediate and personal perspective on events than one normally finds in histories of the Korean war
�October 1, 2000
In 1963, when The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution returned to print in an inexpensively priced paperback, early new left readers discovered (or rediscovered) for themselves a revolutionary classic and a beautifully written account of the first successful slave uprising since Spartacus. The idea that Haitians had not only freed themselves but played a role in the contemporary European class struggles was potent stuff for the emerging Black Power movement
�September 1, 2000
In the United States, the creation of wealth is often presented as a process that benefits everyone within the society. A common shibboleth, made famous during the Kennedy administration, is that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In June 2000, the Conference Board, an organization devoted to the promotion of global business and one of the leading private centers for the analysis of economic statistics, released a report actually entitled Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? The report concludes: “Unfortunately, the answer to date is ‘no ’”
�September 1, 2000
Some wags claim that it is the conservatives who fear socialism, while the radicals believe that capitalism will last forever. Conservatives, they say, fear widespread popular discontent, while radicals abandon hope of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. An exaggeration? Of course. Even so, this witticism is not inappropriate. Many on the left have indeed retreated from class and a vision of a democratic, egalitarian socialism. The important social issues of our day—race, gender, and the environment—more often than not are divorced from the role of class structure. The rule of the capitalist class and the class struggle are shoved to the back burner. Whether consciously or not, the implicit assumption underlying the retreat from class is that capitalism will somehow or other go on and on as it creates miraculous new technology. Best then to stick to making those adjustments in social conditions that the system will presumably allow
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September 1, 2000
When health policy is looked at from the point of view of which issues involve a direct confrontation of fundamental, ruling-class interest, which ones involve simply relative benefits to a class, and which are relatively neutral, we can predict which kinds of measures are possible. This highlights the lie in the notion that society is trying to improve health for everybody.
�September 1, 2000
If there is a single charge that has served to unify all criticism of Marx in recent decades, it is the charge of “Prometheanism.” Although Marx's admiration for Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his attraction to Prometheus as a revolutionary figure of Greek mythology has long been known, the accusation that Marx's work contained at its heart a “Promethean motif,” and that this constituted the principal weakness of his entire analysis, seems to have derived its contemporary influence mainly from Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. The first volume of this work was drafted in Polish in 1968 and appeared in English in 1978.
�September 1, 2000
The View from Alger's Window is a fascinating book. Even if the father and son who share the stage in this memoir were completely anonymous, it would still be an absorbing story. Probably for most readers, however, and surely for almost all Monthly Review subscribers, the father's name will reverberate with what Jack Gelber's Nation review describes as a Nixon-manipulated “story of well-timed leaks, stage-managed press conferences, masterful misleading language.” But as the author himself says, a major objective of his work is to “transform Alger Hiss from a case to a person.” This he has certainly done
�September 1, 2000
At the outset of this closely argued history of Mexican capitalism, James Cockcroft asks, “How long will the majority of Mexicans put up with being exploited on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border? ”
