The Uncontrollability of Globalizing Capital
We live in an age of unprecedented historical crisis. Its severity can be gauged by the fact that we are not facing a more or less extensive cyclic crisis of capitalism as experienced in the past, but the deepening structural crisis of the capital system itself. | more…
January 1998 (Volume 49, Number 8)
MR has always been known for its style as well as its substance. We’ve always aimed for depth of analysis without sacrificing clarity and accessibility. We’ve also tried to keep our articles relatively short, not just to maintain the small and affordable size of the magazine but also because we’re writing for an audience of socialists who lead busy lives—for people who work long and hard hours, in factories, offices, educational institutions, and at home, and for activists no less than for intellectuals. | more…
A Letter to a Contributor
As mentioned over the phone, we like your article very much. It needs to be shortened, and we will be suggesting some editorial changes. Meanwhile, I would like to get your thinking about my disagreement with this statement in your conclusion: “Today’s neo-liberal state is a different kind of capitalist class than the social-democratic, Keynesian interventionist state of the previous period.” I can’t see any significant difference in either the state or its relation to the ruling class, even though clearly there is a considerable difference between the functioning of the capitalist economy during the so-called golden age and the subsequent long stretch of stagnation. I do not mean the absence of any change at all in the capitalist class. Thus, the growing influence of the financial sector (not necessarily a separate sector) is noteworthy. But that is hardly a measure of a major change in the state | more…
Eras of Power
During the past few years a strong challenge has been mounted in the pages of Monthly Review to the argument—prevalent on the left as well as the right—that globalization and technological change have combined to bring us into a new era. Ellen Meiksins Wood captured the gist of the emerging MR position in an essay entitled “Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism” in which she asserts that there has been no historic rupture, no epochal shift, to usher in globalization or postfordism or postmodernism | more…
December 1997 (Volume 49, Number 7)
The New Yorker dated October 20-27 carries, along with a generous menu of futurology, a sensational article on the past and present. It is entitled “The Return of Karl Marx,” by John Cassidy, who is self-identified as an Oxford-educated friend of “a highly intelligent and levelheaded Englishman whose career has taken him…to a big Wall Street investment bank.” Visiting with his friend at the latter’s Long Island summer home during the early summer, the two discussed the economy and speculated on how long the current financial boom would last. | more…
The Women Who Organized Harvard
Balloons transformed Harvard Yard on May 17, 1988, the day the “servants of the university,” as workers were originally called, voted on whether to join the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), an affiliate of AFSCME. “Ballooning” lightened the tension, but Kristine Rondeau, lead union organizer, had a grim warning for her staff: “You did a wonderful job. But we don’t have it … It’s very likely we didn’t win.”1 In fact, by a slim margin, they did have it. One of the most influential universities in the world had been outsmarted by some of its unknown employees, mostly women | more…
Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America
By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy “from below,” the promotion of “grassroots” organization with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a “social cushion.” These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organizations, described as “nongovernmental,” numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide | more…
November 1997 (Volume 49, Number 6)
Ecology, a.k.a. environmental studies, is a relatively new area of scientific interest, mostly a product of the second half of the twentieth century and rapidly growing as the century draws to a close. It combines in one way or another most of the physical and social sciences, defies any attempt to force it into a neat definition of its own, and increasingly raises and attempts to cope with daunting problems such as the future of the human species and other forms of life on earth. No wonder it is an area not only of scientific interest, but also of excitement, confusion, brilliant insights, and stubborn adherence to self-serving dogmas. | more…
Why Marxism?
Just before I left Paris I got a book from Michael Löwy with a new preface and a quotation I want to share with you. It said "Marx is definitely dead for humankind." Come on Daniel, you will object, did you have to travel all the way to give us that tripe we can get here for a penny a dozen! But it’s not your tripe. It comes from Italy. It is by Benedetto Croce from 1907 and it’s exactly ninety years old. I have quoted it to remind you that grave-diggers of Marx—the new philosophers, the Fukuyamas—have plenty of ancestors and will have plenty of successors and it’s not worth while spending much time refuting their paid or unpaid funeral orations. The one point I want to mention is the coincidence between the recent revival of such requiems and the fall of the Soviet Union. | more…
A Critique of Tabb on Globalization
Not only do we reject [so-called “weak” and “strong” versions of “globalization”], we reject the arguments used to support them, namely, that globalization has little basis in economic fact, is no more advanced than it was during the pre-1914 years, and has no significant political consequences. Our version, both “strong” and “nuanced,” would be that since the early 1970s changes in technology and politics have greatly increased the ability of capital to do what it has always wanted to do—turn the world into one “free market” for finance, production, and wage labor. Ideologically strengthened by the collapse of communism, corporate capital has used its initiatory power in the realms of investment, employment, pricing, industrial location, and selective implementation of new technologies to leapfrog ahead of the ability of progressive forces to mobilize and fight back—which takes time, organization, and, if history teaches us anything, decades of struggle. This is not exactly the first time workers, and the entire left, have faced this situation; nor is it the first time that capital has been able to use the nation-state to accomplish its ends easier and faster, this time in significant measure through the creation of supranational institutions promoting the needs of transnational finance and production (NAFTA, EU, WTO, MAI, and multilateral trade agreements, including the latest “Uruguay Round”) | more…
Contextualizing Globalization
In the June 1997 issue of MR, I wrote an essay, “Globalization is an Issue, the Power of Capital is the Issue.” Richard Du Boff and Edward Herman, two economists whose work I respect and whose books I have used in my classes, now polemicize against “Tabb’s unwillingness to acknowledge that globalization…has anything to do with the victories of capital over labor….” I wrote no such thing, as readers can verify for themselves by going back to that June issue. Such a view (which I do not hold) is indeed unreasonable and wrongheaded. They in fact attribute a number views to me which I do not hold. They propose “alternatives” and I agree with a number of these | more…
A Note on Du Boff and Herman
I’m taking the liberty of appending this note because, though Du Boff and Herman’s article is directed mainly at Bill Tabb, it refers to some of the things I’ve written about globalization.…Recently, I got a letter from Bill Doyle, who wrote, “After reading Ed Herman’s comments in Z (magazine), I re-read your article and couldn’t see why Ed was so exercised. I’d be interested to know if you see a substantial difference between the two of you, and, if so, what it is.” Here, with some minor changes and additions, is what I wrote back. | more…
October 1997 (Volume 49, Number 5)
We are writing at the end of August. The two main events of the summer have been (1) the apparent ending of the long stock-market boom of the last few years, and (2) the successful strike of the teamsters against UPS. Neither can be said to have been anticipated and together they point to the emergence of new trends in the period ahead. | more…