October 1, 1999
Organized labor has always privileged collective struggle at the point of production, judging it to be capital's most vulnerable point. Denying employers the labor power needed for the production of surplus value strikes at the reproduction and expansion of capital, the accumulation process which is the core of the system
October 1, 1999
The strikes that have recently brought more than one million teachers and public employees into the streets in South Africa—culminating in a one-day strike on August 25, in which six hundred thousand public workers downed tools nationwide—have been brewing for the past few months
October 1, 1999
Fyodor Dostoevsky's old adage, about measuring a civilization by reviewing its prisons, if followed in the U.S. context, is a condemnation of this nation's own version of the gulag archipelago. A cross-section of prisoner's writings submitted to the PEN writing contest for the past quarter-century reveals the cold, dark underside of the American dream. Men and women, denizens of both state and federal prisons, write brilliantly about trying to stay human in the midst of places of marked inhumanity, and indeed, places that only succeed if they dehumanize
September 1, 1999
We've received three letters from readers complaining about our articles on Kosovo. While this isn't a groundswell of opinion, we assume that there are other readers out there who share the concerns of these critics, and since this is an important issue, we think it's worth returning to it. We won't go over the same ground again, but we want to take up at least one larger question raised by the critics
September 1, 1999
Our choice of political strategies clearly depends in large part on what we think is possible and impossible in any given conditions. And what we think is possible or impossible under capitalism obviously depends on what we think capitalism is. So let me, first, make some general observations about the nature of capitalism
September 1, 1999
It is worth the trip to Syracuse University just to see Ben Shahn's sixty-by-twelve-foot outdoor mural, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Unveiled in 1967, the mosaic tile mural tells the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927 for a crime which they probably did not commit. Witnesses placed them miles from the crime scene when the murder of a paymaster occurred at a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts
September 1, 1999
I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”
July 1, 1999
In his article on the U.S. economy in this issue, Doug Henwood quotes from a piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, and points to the connection between Friedman's view of globalization and his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Well, we read that article and were very much struck by it too. Anyone who thinks we're over the top when we say things like Ellen did in June's Review of the Month about the “new imperialism” should just read Friedman's “Manifesto for the Fast World.”
July 1, 1999
The word “capitalism” is typically applied to a very wide and diverse range of cases—from the United States to Japan, Russia, Brazil, or South Africa. We use the word in this way on the premise that, for all their diversities, all these cases have in common certain basic social forms and economic laws of motion, including a common tendency to crisis. And we talk about “global” capitalism on the premise that national capitalist economies are interconnected, that they are integrated in a global system driven by the same capitalist laws of motion, and that economic crises and prolonged downturns like the current one are not national in origin but are rooted in the general dynamics that drive the whole global economy and in the relations that bind all capitalist economies together
July 1, 1999
If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continent's southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production. Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it
