Articles

Rekindling Socialist Imagination: Utopian Vision and Working-Class Capacities

by Leo Panitchand Sam Gindin

March 1, 2000

“A continental welfare state, modeled on the comparatively successfulsocial democracy of the United States. That's the ticket. Do it the American way.” This recipe for what path Europe should follow isn't the Economist calling for a new realism, or the voice of American imperialism talking through the Wall Street Journal, or even a stolen quote from a member of Tony Blair's cabinet caught in private conversation. It's the concluding lines of an article on an alternative for Europe published in the New Left Review, once the home and hope for a rejuvenation of creative Marxism

Restoring Memory

by Ali Shehzad Zaidi

March 1, 2000

Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files (New York: Dial Press, 1999), 564 pp., $26.95.

It is fitting that the “Atomic Century” draw to a close with the publication of The Plutonium Files. A decade in the making, Eileen Welsome's book explores the secret human radiation experiments that grew out of the U. S. atom bomb program. Carried out under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy's predecessor, the experiments were designed to help determine atom bomb plant safety standards and to replicate nuclear battlefield conditions. As a result, thousands of hospital patients and servicemen were unknowingly exposed to dangerous levels of radiation

The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation in Russia and China

by Nancy Holmstromand Richard Smith

February 1, 2000

The Russian bank laundering scandal in the newspapers last fall is only the latest installment in the ongoing saga of corruption coming out of the former Soviet Union. The more important question is: where did they get the money in the first place? How, for example, did the former Premier of the Ukraine manage to buy a seven million dollar mansion in Marin County, California, on his official salary of a few thou- sand dollars a year? The answer is only too apparent: Moscow's gangster rule has become so well known that the term "Mafia" has lost its exclusively Italian connotation. China is not much better

Kosovo and “The Jewish Question”

by John Rosenthal

February 1, 2000

Whether or not it is true, as Vaclav Havel famously claimed, that NATO's attack on Yugoslavia represents the first war to be waged "in the name of principles and values," the first "ethical war," it might well be the case that it is the first act of armed aggression against a sovereign state whose popular legitimization relied almost wholly upon an alleged historical analogy. NATO spokespersons and apologists could not allude often enough to the Second World War,Hitler, and the Nazi regime's persecution of the Jews. They did this in lieu of providing reasoned justification for NATO's action, perhaps because under existing international law there was surely no such
justification to be found

Remembering Murray Levin

by Howard Zinn

February 1, 2000

I suspect that many on the U.S. left do not know the name of Murray Levin—political scientist, writer, teacher—who died at the age of seventy-two in late 1999. It would be hard to characterize his politics in simple terms; “socialist,” “radical,” “progressive?” In the thirty-five years I knew him, including twenty-four years as his close friend and colleague at Boston University, there was never any occasion to describe him in any of those ways

The World Trade Organization? Stop World Take Over

by William K. Tabb

January 1, 2000

On November 30,1999, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) opened its third round of ministerial meetings, the three thousand official delegates, two thousand journalists, and other registered observers were greatly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of protesters who came from all over the world to denounce the organization. Estimates of protester numbers ranged to forty thousand, according to the Seattle Times, which told its readers that the demonstrations were larger than those of 1970, when twenty to thirty thousand people (ten thousand according to the Seattle Times) shut down Interstate 5 to protest the Vietnam War. The parallel is appropriate. The still-growing movement in opposition to efforts of institutions such as the WTO to take over the management of the international economy may well be larger than any popular protest movement of the last twenty years or more.

The Blair Kitsch Project

by Tariq Ali

January 1, 2000

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was not simply the Soviet Union or the "communist idea" or the efficacy of Marxist solutions that collapsed. Western European social democracy, too, was severely dented. In the face of a triumphalist capitalist storm that swept the world it, too, had to trim its sails. The fact that, barring Spain, social democratic parties or coalitions govern most of Western Europe today is of inter- est largely because of the collective experience it provides: these parties can no longer deliver effective policies that improve the conditions of the majority of electors whose votes have placed them in power. Capitalism, unchallenged from any quarter, no longer feels the need to protect its left flank by conceding reforms

Newsletter sign-up

Keep up to date with all the latest socialist news from MR