Sanctions on Iran: What’s Missing from Obama’s New Dialogue
On June 4, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama gave a key foreign policy speech in Cairo, Egypt. He advocated new, positive relations between the United States and Muslim countries, focusing on relations with the Middle East. He also mentioned establishing new relations with Iran: “There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.”…But this new promise “to move forward without preconditions” should be viewed in the wider context of continuous economic and military pressures on Iran and on the entire region of the Middle East. | more…
Why Programs Fail
Several generations of development programs have left the gap between rich and poor countries wider than ever. Decades of aid and foreign investment have extracted many times more wealth than they bring in. Seventeen years after the Earth Summit at Rio, carbon dioxide continues to increase. The non-proliferation treaty has left us with more nukes, more countries possessing nukes, more sophisticated nuclear weapons, more willingness to use them. The fanfare of the Green Revolution has died down, and farmers are still being displaced to cities that can’t accommodate them. The first homes of the Green Revolution are now importers of food. Agricultural yields have increased, but so has hunger. Millennial development goals will not be reached.…It is not that no programs work. There have been dramatic successes such as the eradication of smallpox, the near eradication of polio, the containment of plague.…There is a pattern of a sort: narrowly focused technical solutions reshuffle crises. | more…
Saving History from Oblivion in Guerrero
In summer 2009, the case of Rosendo Radilla, the first to deal with forced disappearance by the Mexican state, went before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IAHRC). In December, the Court found Mexico guilty of the crimes of systematic human rights violations and forced disappearance. This was a landmark development led by the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared and Victims of Violations of Human Rights in Mexico (AFADEM) and the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) in a struggle with the Mexican government to obtain information on what happened to those disappeared by the authorities during the country’s guerra sucia, or dirty war, in the 1970s. | more…
Margaret Randall’s Years in Cuba
Margaret Randall, To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 256 pages, $24.95, paperback.
Margaret Randall has always been too much of a feminist for the socialists and too much of a socialist for the feminists. She is one of the foremost oral historians of recent revolutionary history and, more specifically, of the history of women in revolutions. Yet her work has been consistently undervalued. Her memoir…is a rare double opportunity: an intimate look at the Cuban Revolution from 1969 to 1980, and a fascinating portrait of the development of a historian, poet, and political thinker. | more…
February 2010 (Volume 61, Number 9)
If it is the best of times for the bankers, it is the worst of times for workers. The titans of Wall Street came calling in Washington, D.C. just a few months ago, and were given the keys to the Treasury’s vault. So successful has been the government’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout that even those giant financial institutions in the worst shape are paying back what they owe, mainly to get out from under what they consider to be onerous public interference in their extraordinarily lucrative business activities.…Where bankers once sat quietly while the people’s presumed tribunes in Congress scolded them for their errant ways, now they are dictating the terms of financial “reform” and feeling bold enough to phone in their regrets when fog delayed their plane and they couldn’t make a White House meeting with President Obama, who is begging them day and night to start making loans. | more…
The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital
Three years ago, in December 2006, I wrote an article for Monthly Review entitled “Monopoly-Finance Capital.” The occasion was the anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, published four decades earlier in 1966.…The article…[discussed] “the dual reality” of stagnant growth (or stagnation) and financialization, characterizing the advanced economies in this phase of capitalism. I concluded that this pointed to two possibilities: (1) a major financial and economic crisis in the form of “global debt meltdown and debt-deflation,” and (2) a prolongation of the symbiotic stagnation-financialization relationship of monopoly-finance capital. In fact, what we have experienced in the last two years, I would argue, is each of these sequentially: the worst financial-economic crisis since the 1930s, and then the system endeavoring to right itself by returning to financialization as its normal means of countering stagnation. It is thus doubly clear today that we are in a new phase of capitalism. In what follows, I shall attempt to outline the logic of this argument, as it evolved out of the work of Baran, Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff in particular, and how it relates to our present economic and social predicament. | more…
The U.S. Economy and China: Capitalism, Class, and Crisis
The U.S. economy is in bad shape and people are understandably seeking solutions. Many, encouraged by mainstream media and politicians, believe that China’s trade policies bear primary responsibility for the structural decay of our economy and that recovery will require, above all, pressuring the Chinese government to implement “market-freeing” policy changes that will bring the U.S.-China trade relationship into balance.…Despite its popularity, this nation-state approach to understanding the dynamics of the U.S.-China relationship is seriously flawed. | more…
Beyond “Green Capitalism”
A disdain for the natural environment has characterized capitalism from the beginning. As Marx noted, capital abuses the soil as much as it exploits the worker. The makings of ecological breakdown are thus inherent in capitalism. No serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework. | more…
István Mészáros, Pathfinder of Socialism
If I were asked to sum up the significance of István Mészáros for our time, I would have to follow President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in referring to him as the “Pathfinder of Socialism.” His work…provides a strategic vision of the building of socialism, the absence of which, for many decades, constituted one of the principal weaknesses of the anti-capitalist movement, worldwide. | more…
An Untold Chapter in Black History
I was nineteen when I joined the Black Panther Party and was introduced to the realities of life in inner-city Black America.…From the security of the college campus and the cocoon of the great American Dream Machine, I was suddenly stripped of my rose-colored glasses by a foray into Harlem and indecent housing, police brutality, hungry children needing to be fed, elderly people eating out of garbage cans, and hopelessness and despair everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never have believed that this was America. It looked and sounded like one of those undeveloped Third World countries. | more…
Exploring the Dialectic of the Bolivarian Revolution
Iain Bruce, The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the 21st Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 240 pages, $27.90, paperback.
“When Chávez speaks, we listen. But we don’t listen to those around him.” This comment by a community activist interviewed by Iain Bruce, and integrated into his wonderful exploration of the Bolivarian Revolution from below, points to an essential characteristic — the unique link at present (“por ahora”) between Hugo Chávez and the exploited and excluded of Venezuela. | more…
January 2010 (Volume 61, Number 8)
As this issue goes to press, the Copenhagen climate summit, which Nicholas Stern, author of The Economics of Climate Change, has referred to as “the most important meeting since the Second World War,” is about to begin. The summit was supposed to herald a new global climate treaty, to replace the failed and expiring Kyoto Protocol. The goal was to create an ambitious, binding international agreement on emissions reductions. Yet, barely a week before its commencement (as we write this) it seems destined to fail. | more…
Why Ecological Revolution?
It is now universally recognized within science that humanity is confronting the prospect—if we do not soon change course—of a planetary ecological collapse. Not only is the global ecological crisis becoming more and more severe, with the time in which to address it fast running out, but the dominant environmental strategies are also forms of denial, demonstrably doomed to fail, judging by their own limited objectives. This tragic failure, I will argue, can be attributed to the refusal of the powers that be to address the roots of the ecological problem in capitalist production and the resulting necessity of ecological and social revolution. | more…