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2015

Marx on the Camino de Santiago

Meaning, Work, and Crisis

When I walked the thousand-year-old route of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain in September and October 2014, I expected to discuss questions of health with fellow travelers. I assumed that an ancient pilgrimage would be full of walkers pondering health issues and would provide an ethnographer’s panacea for “getting in.” I was wrong. I was surrounded by walkers from all parts of Europe, but they were pondering the meaning of work, capitalism, and their lives. I found I was seeing a profound crisis of capitalism and individuals struggling with alienated labor as discussed by Karl Marx.… [W]hat I saw on the Camino de Santiago was certainly not a revolutionary movement. Envisioning satisfying work, however, helps change the shared conception of what work is. Raul Zibechi argued that as we struggle both individually or collectively, we engage in an emancipatory process that, as the Zapatista’s Subcomandante Marcos notes, “builds, includes, brings together and remembers whereas the system, separates, splits and fragments.”… Awareness of alienated labor and struggle against crisis, whether individual or collective, does seem to create imaginative space for change even if it does not necessarily reflect what has been thought of as revolutionary struggle. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 66, Number 11 (April 2015)

April 2015 (Volume 66, Number 11)

The Review of the Month in this issue (“Chávez and the Communal State” by John Bellamy Foster) focuses on the revolutionary political strategy introduced by Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. In the process it addresses how István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital played a key, strategic role in the development of Chávez’s thinking. Beyond Capital is a daunting philosophical work of around a thousand pages, while many of his other writings are nearly as challenging. MR readers will therefore be pleased to learn that we have just published a new book by Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (Monthly Review Press, 2015), expressly designed, as Foster writes in the book’s “Foreword,” as “an easily accessible work,” providing “a way into his thinking for the uninitiated” (9).… Yet, Mészáros’s new book is much more than that. | more…

Chávez and the Communal State

On the Transition to Socialism in Venezuela

On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle. Chávez surprised even some of his strongest supporters by his insistence on the need for changes at the top in order to promote an immediate leap forward in the creation of what is referred to as “the communal state.” This was to accelerate the shift of power to the population that had begun with the formation of the communal councils (groupings of families involved in self-governance projects—in densely populated urban areas, 200–400 families; in rural areas, 50–100 families). The main aim in the new revolutionary cycle, he insisted, was to speed up the registration of communes, the key structure of the communal state. | more…

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?

“Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life,” noted Frederick Engels at Marx’s graveside, “was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat.” Could the same be said about Marxist economists? That they are revolutionaries whose real mission is to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism? | more…

On the Legacy of the International Working Men’s Association after 150 Years

Interview with Marcello Musto

The International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), nowadays better known as the First International, was founded in London in September 1864. Despite the importance of the event, there has not been much attention to its 150th anniversary. To an extent, this reflects the situation of the present day, with the hegemony of neoliberal politics and, conversely, the weakness of the left, that does not seem to be interested in its own history and the lessons that might be extracted from past experiences.… Luckily, there are exceptions. Marcello Musto, an assistant professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, has contributed to two important presentations of the experience of the First International… The International after 150 Years: Labour Versus Capital, Then and Now …[and] the first English-language anthology on the IWMA, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later. | more…

The Nonprofit-Corporate Complex

An Integral Component and Driving Force of Imperialism in the Phase of Monopoly-Finance Capitalism

According to Michał Kalecki, the imperialist system of the Keynesian era rested on a triangular structure that was composed of (a) state-financed military production (i.e., the military-corporate complex, often called the “military-industrial complex”), (b) media propaganda (media-corporate complex), and (c) a putative full-employment/welfare-oriented superstructure (Keynesianism) underpinned by the war machine, serving to justify it. Building on Kalecki’s work, John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney provided an updated version of the theory of imperialism of the monopoly-capital tradition by laying emphasis on the primary role of the above triangle in the restructuring and preservation of the contemporary imperialist system.. Expanding on their work, I argue that one of the most significant changes in the triangular structure of contemporary imperialism is in its third pillar, particularly with the abandonment of the welfare-oriented paradigm and the adoption of the neoliberal globalization project. | more…

The Nazi Threat in the United States

Imported or Homegrown?

Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2014), 256 pages, $28.00, hardcover.

Fascism has come full circle…. The main sponsor of this regime this time is not Nazi Germany but Washington…. U.S. military adventures in the Middle East and Africa [and the] [r]esort to imperialist wars abroad also reflects growing social polarization at home, the hollowing out of U.S. liberal democracy as a result of the power of money, the gigantic expansion of the security and surveillance state, the spread of armed vigilantism, the intensification of racism, and the militarization of the U.S. police.… What we are likely witnessing is a situation in which it is no longer possible for the capitalist class in crisis to rule the people of the United States in the old way. A process is underway that involves the withering away of liberal democracy and the arrival of a not-so-friendly fascist order meant to bolster capitalism through a resort to authoritarian discipline. How far this process goes depends on political events and the effects of the ongoing economic crisis on public consciousness. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 66, Number 10 (March 2015)

March 2015 (Volume 66, Number 10)

Notes from the Editors

From its earliest years, Monthly Review has been distinguished among socialist publications by the degree to which it has incorporated environmental views into its fundamental perspective. Paul Sweezy’s 1950 article, “An Economic Program for America”…listed conservation of natural resources and the elimination of destructive waste as two of the primary goals in the development of socialism. He called for the socialization, long-term planning, and conservation of “coal…oil and natural gas and all the other fuels which provide the lifeblood of modern industrial society.” Scott Nearing’s monthly column “World Events,” written for MR from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, regularly examined environmental, along with political-economic, developments. Nearing was a socialist economist and environmentalist.… With the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Nearing explored its wider ecological implications, contending that civilization had entered the “phase of suicidal destructivity…. Without doubt man has built a pyramid of potential destructivity…. Man is a destroyer as well as a builder. He has exterminated entire species…. He has destroyed forests and opened the soil to erosion. He has engaged in fratricidal wars that have wiped out one civilization after another and presently threaten to end western civilization” (Nearing, “World Events,” Monthly Review, November 1962). | more…

A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible with Capitalism

From humanitarian and ecological viewpoints, many aspects of the capitalist economic system are irrational; although they are certainly rational from the more limited standpoint of the individual business or capitalist seeking to make profits.… With regard to the environment there are scores of examples of irrational behavior by capitalist businesses that have the ultimate goal of making profits. Many practices and side effects of the way the system functions degrade the ecosystem and its processes on which we depend and may also directly harm humans. For example, it is not rational to introduce chemicals into the environment, including into products we use daily, that are either toxic or cause illnesses of various types. Yet there are over 80,000 chemicals used in the United States; few of them are tested for their effects on people or other species, and many commonly used ones are suspected to be carcinogens or have other detrimental effects. | more…

GMOs: Capitalism’s Distortion of Biological Processes

Last summer, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked to comment on the furor surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs). He responded with the assertion that humans have been genetically modifying organisms for millennia, giving us food crops such as seedless watermelons or corn. This process, he stated, is little different from genetic engineering.… Tyson’s first mistake lies in his equation of artificial selection and genetic modification, reflecting common misunderstandings of both the sources of genetic variation and the distinction between the latter and mechanisms of evolutionary change. Tyson’s second mistake is his failure to see the bigger picture. The dynamic of capital accumulation is fundamentally at odds with ecosystem dynamics. And technology, in our society, is the handmaiden of capital accumulation. This article will elaborate on these distinctions and discuss some of the basic biological processes underlying GMOs and their potential risks, especially risks of dispersal. It will then examine how capitalism molds the technology and accentuates the risks. | more…

Bangladesh—A Model of Neoliberalism

The Case of Microfinance and NGOs

In 2006, a few months after the Nobel Peace Prize for Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank was announced, I was visiting Germany [where many] Germans…looked at it as a victory over neoliberalism. One German activist theatre group invited me to the show of their latest drama, Taslima and the Microcredit. The show was eye opening for me: I realized to what extent Grameen Bank had been misunderstood in the West, and how media campaigns and public relations activities, including embedded studies, created a myth around the Grameen Bank and Yunus.… The theatre organizers requested me to join a discussion following the show. Standing before a mesmerized audience, I had to tell them the hard truth with facts and figures. I said that, despite their best wishes, they were making a terrible mistake. Grameen had never been an alternative to the World Bank-pushed neoliberal economic model; rather, it was born and brought up as a necessary supplement to it. | more…

The Personal Is Political

The Political Economy of Noncommercial Radio Broadcasting in the United States

In this essay, I look at the problems facing progressives and those on the political left in the United States in participating in political analysis and debate in mainstream journalism and the news media. I focus on radio broadcasting, as this is where much of political discussion takes place in the United States. Radio broadcasting is the least expensive of the media for production and reception, is ubiquitous, has adapted itself to the Internet, and is uniquely suited for locally based programming.… I look specifically at my own experience hosting a weekly public affairs program on an NPR (National Public Radio)-affiliated radio station in Illinois from 2002–2012. This was, to my knowledge, the only NPR series hosted by a socialist in the network’s history. | more…