From Tahrir Square to Wall Street, from Athens to Montreal, dreams of emancipation are mobilizing a new wave of revolts all over the world. Simultaneously the forces of repression are being unleashed everywhere to impose “new mechanisms of social control” with the aim of establishing “new conditions for achieving surplus value” in the aftermath of a protracted capitalist economic crisis.1 Some anticipated a Chinese popular uprising following the Arab Spring. Instead, since spring 2012 the world has seen a sensational drama of elite struggle surrounding the ousting of the Chongqing head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Politburo member Bo Xilai, including a crackdown on his Chongqing Model of development. Even though the CCP has been able to contain large-scale social unrest, divisions amongst the elite became a focal point of political struggle during this dangerous year of power transition in China. [T] | more…
Last May President Obama signed a proclamation establishing the “Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War,” meant to last for thirteen years, from Memorial Day 2012 to Veterans Day 2025, and to be conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense. A few days later, on Memorial Day, Obama gave a speech…. [declaring] that the Vietnam War represented a “national shame, a disgrace that should never have happened.” But the “national shame” to which he referred was not due to the deaths of several million people, nor atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, the unleashing of chemical weapons (most notoriously Agent Orange), and the U.S. war machine’s use of more than twice the explosive power in the Vietnam War as employed by all sides in the Second World War…. [F]or Obama, the “national shame” was that returning U.S. troops were not always “welcomed home,” were often “blamed for the misdeeds of a few,” and were “sometimes…denigrated”—despite the fact that they had made enormous sacrifices in a war that they “didn’t start.”… It should be obvious…that the current plans for an extended Commemoration…. is an attempt to rewrite history and to erase from the national memory the basic facts about the most horrendous imperialist (North-South) war of the twentieth century, as well as the most unpopular war in U.S. history. | more…
While the recent growth in transnational campaigns and coalitions has been welcomed by many, critics have questioned whether they reproduce existing global inequalities in power and resources. This article, which details a struggle for hegemony in a transnational anti-corporate alliance between a core country non-governmental organization (Greenpeace International) and a peripheral country social movement (the movement for justice in Bhopal), shows that the power in such alliances does not only reside with the core country organization. | more…
This issue of Monthly Review focuses particularly on China. Aside from the Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, which addresses the Chinese economy and its relation to the current phase of the capitalist world economy, we are publishing two separate contributions by Chinese scholars, one by Wen Tiejun, et. al., on the new rural reconstruction movement in China, and one by Zhihe Wang on the development of ecological Marxism in China. Our own thesis is that the era of rapid growth in China is leading to a period of deepening contradiction. The present accelerated growth is based on the intensive exploitation of migrant labor and the capitalization of newly urban land. For various reasons this model is reaching its outer limits, economically, socially, and ecologically. This suggests that China is on the wrong road, and must change directions. | more…
Five years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 began there is still no sign of a full recovery of the world economy. Consequently, concern has increasingly shifted from financial crisis and recession to slow growth or stagnation, causing some to dub the current era the Great Stagnation. Stagnation and financial crisis are now seen as feeding into one another.… To be sure, a few emerging economies have seemingly bucked the general trend, continuing to grow rapidly—most notably China, now the world’s second largest economy after the United States. Yet, as [IMF Managing Director Christine] Lagarde warned her Chinese listeners, “Asia is not immune” to the general economic slowdown, “emerging Asia is also vulnerable to developments in the financial sector.” So sharp were the IMF’s warnings, dovetailing with widespread fears of a sharp Chinese economic slowdown, that Lagarde in late November was forced to reassure world business, declaring that stagnation was probably not imminent in China (the Bloomberg.com headline ran: “IMF Sees Chinese Economy Avoiding Stagnation.”) | more…
The governments of almost all developing countries are facing the long-term twin problems of capital shortages and high fiscal debts, resulting from their attempts to modernize the state forms and economic and financial relations left by colonialism or copied from western political culture. Whether they claimed to be of the left or the right ideologically, they almost invariably undertook policies to attract foreign investment and encourage domestic private investors to join the global industrialization competition during the twentieth century…. Continental China, the biggest developing country, with the largest population (but also with significant natural resource constraints) has close to 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 9 percent of its arable land and a mere 6 percent of its fresh water. Over the centuries, China had its share of drought- or flood-induced famines. But if not for a 6,000-year history of irrigated agriculture, with its related “village rationality” based on traditional indigenous knowledge—which internalizes risks by its multifunctional rural cultures of sustainable self-reliance—China would have been a land of perpetual hunger. | more…
Chinese interest in ecological Marxism has grown increasingly in the past twenty years. Amazingly, it has even become, to some extent, an important part of contemporary Marxism in China. But why has it been so well received? This paper will offer some reasons for this and also point out the challenges now facing ecological Marxism in China. | more…
One of the enduring myths about capitalism that continues to be perpetuated in mainstream economic textbooks and other pedagogic strategies is that labor supply is somehow exogenous to the economic system. The supply of labor is typically assumed, especially in standard growth theories, to be determined by the rate of population growth, which in turn is also seen as “outside” the economic system rather than in interplay with it. The reality is, of course, very different: the supply of labor has been very much a result of economic processes, not something extraneous to it. Throughout its history, capitalism has proved adept at causing patterns of labor supply to change in accordance with demand…. But nowhere has this particular capacity of capitalism to generate its own labor been more evident than in the case of female labor. | more…
In April 2011, the Wall Street Journal‘s South Asia columnist Sadanand Dhume published a piece entitled “It’s Time to Re-Align India.” Meeting in Hainan, China, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) called for a multipolar world (i.e. one no longer dominated by the Atlantic powers, led by the United States) and for a less militaristic approach to common problems—with special reference to the imbroglio in Libya, fast becoming the twenty-first century’s Yugoslavia. Focusing on India, Dhume wrote in response: “Like a monster in a B-grade horror film, India’s love affair with non-alignment refuses to die…. The end of the Cold War should have ended this approach to foreign policy. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.” | more…
In July 2009, workers at the state-owned Tonghua Steel Company in Jilin, China organized a massive anti-privatization protest. Then, in the summer of 2010, a wave of strikes swept through China’s coastal provinces. These events may prove to be a historic turning point. After decades of defeat, retreat, and silence, the Chinese working class is now re-emerging as a new social and political force.… How will the rise of the Chinese working class shape the future of China and the world? Will the Chinese capitalist class manage to accommodate the working-class challenge while maintaining the capitalist system? Or will the rise of the Chinese working class lead to a new Chinese socialist revolution that could, in turn, pave the way for a global socialist revolution? The answers to these questions will, to a large extent, determine the course of world history in the twenty-first century. | more…
For more than forty years, defenders of the Rosenbergs have offered an argument unchanged in its essentials. The prosecution obtained the ultimate punishment…[—and that] punishment…was disproportionate and barbaric. However, the Rosenbergs’ defenders now concede that “Julius Rosenberg, code-named ‘Antenna’ and later ‘Liberal,’ had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union.”… The reason for this turnaround is that in 1995 the federal government made public a series of cables, referred to as the “Venona” messages, which were exchanged between the Soviet government and its operatives in the United States during and after the Second World War.… At the end of the play [Waiting for Lefty] a man runs up the center aisle carrying important information that the title character has been killed. These days, I want to shout out to the audience, as did that man, but with a different message. My imagined dramatic scene goes as follows. “Wait, wait!… Listen to me. Please listen.… You’ve heard the Thesis of the defense. You’ve heard the Antithesis of the prosecution. Don’t you want to hear the Synthesis?” | more…
In November, Fred Magdoff traveled to Shanghai with his wife, Amy Demarest, to attend the Marxism and Ecological Civilization conference at Fudan University (see the Review of the Month in this issue). Here are some reflections from Fred about the conference, Shanghai, and China, past and present | more…
