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April 2000 (Volume 51, Number 11)

Notes from the Editors

This space has, from its earliest years, been devoted to MR affairs, viewing the readers as part of a larger family. Recently, we began to use the space for commentary on political and economic developments also. The occasion of Paul’s 90th on April 10, however, calls for something very different. If you guess that this will be a love letter, you are not mistaken. I have long wanted to express publicly my feelings about Paul. A review of his contributions to knowledge and theoretical analysis about capitalism and socialism would require a long essay. I prefer to say a few words about him as my friend and comrade  | more…

March 2000 (Volume 51, Number 10)

Notes from the Editors

What do Helmut Kohl and Elián Gonzáles have in common? What could possibly unite the destinies of the huge former Chancellor of Germany, who for so many years dominated European politics and played the part of senior statesman on the global stage, and the little boy whose only political role so far has been as pawn in the hands of fading right-wing Cuban fanatics in Miami?  | more…

February 2000 (Volume 51, Number 9)

Notes from the Editors

Isaac Deutscher once said that, in dealing with some questions, Marxists have to wear gloves. If memory serves, he was talking particularly about the nationalisms of the oppressed. | more…

December 1999 (Volume 51, Number 7)

Notes from the Editors

Recently, we were talking about the environment to a well-known sociologist and got into a fairly heated debate about the ecological effects of capitalism. He insisted that capitalism has nothing to do with it. All human practices, he said, inevitably affect the natural environment and have done so since the dawn of history. This seemed to us a pretty simplistic and ahistorical argument  | more…

November 1999 (Volume 51, Number 6)

Notes from the Editor

We’ve been discussing among ourselves exactly what we want to achieve with these Notes from the Editors, and our conclusion is that we want to leave the objectives of the Notes as open-ended as they always have been. Over the years, they have been everything from editorials about some pressing current event, to news about the MR community, or reflections on something we’ve read, including correspondence from our readers. What these all have in common is that they give us a chance to make more or less current comments on things that have happened or things we’ve been thinking about since the last issue. | more…

October 1999 (Volume 51, Number 5)

Notes from the Editors

Many MR readers will remember when teaching the theory of evolution was prohibited by law in some U.S. states. This wasn’t just at the time of the infamous Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925 but still decades later. In the 1950s, during the McCarthy era, the anti-evolution law took on a new significance, symbolizing the suppression of intellectual freedom which was the hallmark of that grim episode in U.S. history. In 1955, the ACLU, which had initiated the original constitutional test of the Tennessee law that culminated in the Scopes trial, again called for repeal of the law, as a symbol of every attack on the freedom of thought. That same year, “Inherit the Wind” appeared on Broadway, presenting the “monkey trial” as a thinly disguised metaphor for McCarthyism  | more…

September 1999 (Volume 51, Number 4)

Notes from the Editors

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  | more…

July-August 1999 (Volume 51, Number 3)

Notes from the Editors

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.”  | more…

June 1999 (Volume 51, Number 2)

Notes from the Editors

We celebrated our fiftieth anniversary with a dinner on May 7. It was a really marvelous occasion, and we were delighted to see so many of you there. The space was filled to capacity, with 350 people seated, and some who couldn’t get seats at the tables were standing —just to enjoy the atmosphere. We were struck not only by the numbers that turned out but by the terrific spirit that permeated the whole affair. | more…

May 1999 (Volume 51, Number 1)

Notes from the Editors

This issue marks our fiftieth anniversary. We’re sure our readers don’t need to be told about the odds against a socialist magazine surviving through this particular half century. We began at a time when socialism was a dirty word in the United States, and we’re still here today, in fact growing again, after a decade in which people have been abandoning socialism in droves. | more…

April 1999 (Volume 50, Number 11)

Notes from the Editors

What a fuss people made about the recent Olympics scandal. You would think the existence of bribery and corruption in the sporting world came as a great revelation, and that people had reason to expect the Olympic games to be immune to practices that are widespread not only in sports but in other commercial enterprises on this global scale.…But there’s still something interesting to talk about here—not so much about the specific case of the Olympics scandal but about the whole idea of corruption. There is something interesting about the moral indignation we’ve been hearing. For that matter, the very notion of corruption is a curious one, really. What does it actually mean? | more…