The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?
“If we believe in people, if we believe that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development,” our choice is clear: socialism or barbarism.” These concluding lines from “The Path to Human Development” appear on the back cover of one Venezuelan edition—a pocket-sized edition much like the widely circulated “Socialism Does Not Drop from the Sky” (chapter 5 of Build It Now). The other edition, together with an extended edition of that latter essay (including my “New Wings for Socialism” from the April 2006 Monthly Review), is being published as The Logic of Capital versus the Logic of Human Development for the communal council libraries in Venezuela. | more…
January 2009 (Volume 60, Number 8)
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism. However, while the Great Depression has been very much in the news of late, this is not due so much to this anniversary as to the fact that for the first time since the 1930s an economic crisis has arisen on a scale and of a nature that invites direct comparison with that earlier deep downturn, which threatened the entire system and ended in the Second World War. | more…
Why Cuba Still Matters
In the early 1990s there was near unanimity in the media, in Western political circles, and even among academics that the collapse of the Cuban revolution was imminent. Even today, many observers regard it as only a matter of time for Cuba to undergo a transition to democracy (understood as a narrowly defined polyarchy) and a “market economy.” | more…
The Long March of the Cuban Revolution
The Cuban revolutionary victory of January 1, 1959, was a news event of epochal proportion even for those who knew little about that country. For many, it was like discovering a new world. And as in the age of the great navigators, encountering it was clouded both by ignorance and the prejudices that usually accompany such revelations. | more…
The Cuban Revolutionary Doctor: The Ultimate Weapon of Solidarity
On August 19, 1960, Che Guevara gave a talk to the Cuban Militia “On Revolutionary Medicine”: “A few months ago, here in Havana, it happened that a group of newly graduated doctors did not want to go into the country’s rural areas and demanded remuneration before they would agree to go.” | more…
Tobacco Worker
Nancy Morejón’s mother was a tobacco worker; her father worked on the Havana docks and was a merchant seaman. She is a direct beneficiary of the Cuban revolution, holding a degree in French literature from the University of Havana. The author of twelve volumes of poetry and numerous books and articles on Cuban and Caribbean culture, she has also been director of the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Americas, the premier Latin American cultural institution. Morejón’s work has been translated into many languages, including, in English, Looking Within (Wayne State University Press, 2003) and With Eyes and Soul, with photographs by Milton Rogovin (White Pine Press, 2004, www.whitepine.org) from which this poem is reprinted. Copyright © 2004 by Nancy Morejón; Translation copyright © 2004 by David Frye. Used by permission. | more…
The Urban Agriculture of Havana
Over the last fifteen years, Cuba has developed one of the most successful examples of urban agriculture in the world. Havana, the capital of Cuba, with a population of over two million people, has played a prominent, if not dominant role, in the evolution and revolution of this type of agriculture. The phrase “urban agriculture in Cuba” has a somewhat different meaning, simultaneously more and less restrictive than might appear at a first glance. It is more inclusive, as it allows for large expanses, urban fringes, and suburban lands. For example, the entire cultivated area of the Province of the City of Havana belongs to urban agriculture. | more…
December 2008 (Volume 60, Number 7)
The historic testimony by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan before the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform on October 23, 2008, represented such a startling turnaround for an individual previously given such nicknames as “Maestro” and “Oracle,” that it might well have been entitled “The Education of Alan Greenspan.” Taken to task for the enormous and still growing economic disaster, Greenspan acknowledged that he was “shocked and dismayed” by the emergence of what he called a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami.” In his effort to account for the complete failure of foresight at the Fed, Greenspan explained that the supposedly sophisticated asset pricing models that he and others in the financial community had relied on had been based almost exclusively on the experience of the last two decades during a period of rapid financial expansion, and had failed to incorporate the negative shocks visible from a longer-term historical perspective. As Greenspan himself put it | more…
Financial Implosion and Stagnation
“The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.” In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been “bailing like hell” for more than a year. Beginning in July 2007 when the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had speculated heavily in mortgage-backed securities signaled the onset of a major credit crunch, the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury Department have pulled out all the stops as finance has imploded. They have flooded the financial sector with hundreds of billions of dollars and have promised to pour in trillions more if necessary—operating on a scale and with an array of tools that is unprecedented. | more…
America Right or Wrong: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945
British subordination to the United States, the so-called special relationship as it is optimistically known in London, is so taken for granted that it is seldom subjected to critical scrutiny. Why is it that the British ruling class and its agents have since 1945 come to embrace a junior partnership in the U.S. empire so wholeheartedly? Most recently, the “special relationship” has seen the New Labor government actively support and take part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the face of a hostile public opinion. Indeed, the largest demonstration in British history, on February 15, 2003, was against British participation in this unprovoked war of imperialist aggression. The lying, dishonest pretext for the invasion together with | more…
Braddock, Pennsylvania Out of the Furnace and into the Fire
As far as scenic ruins go, the Pittsburgh metropolitan area sets a high standard. The natural beauty of the Monongahela Valley and the built legacy of deindustrialization make gorgeous scenery out of blue-collar defeat. Beauty is no compensation for lost jobs though. The old steel towns of this region have been imploding for decades. No place has lost a greater share of its population than Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. This ravaged, near-empty stretch of abandoned homes, storefronts, and buildings was once a storied cornerstone of the industrial age. After losing 90 percent of its peak population, today it looks more like the nightmare at the end of the American Dream | more…
Happening upon the Exploding Sand Sculpture Competition on TV
Denise Bergman is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher (2005), which was translated into Braille and made into a Talking Book. Her poems have been widely published. She conceived and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry, and she was the author of Keyhole Poems, a sequence that combines the history of twelve specific urban places with the present. An excerpt of her poem “Red” is permanently installed as public art in Cambridge, Massachusetts | more…
The Human Costs of Economic Growth
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 395 + xxiv pages, hardcover, $76, paper, $34.95.
The great debate of social science for the last two centuries at least has been how to account for the extraordinary economic growth of the modern world. We all know the basic picture. The overwhelming majority of authors have argued that the story is that of the rise of the West. There have been, however, two opposing versions of this narrative. One is the Whig interpretation of history, which argues that it has been a story of steady social, intellectual, and moral progress whose explanation lies in some particular characteristic of the West (often just of England). In this version, the world is reaching its summit of progress today. The second version is Marxism, which has argued that the rise of the West is part of a larger story of steady dialectical and conflictual historical development. In this version, the present West-dominated world order will inevitably be superseded by another phase of historical development, in which capitalism will be replaced by communism | more…