May 1, 2011
In February 2011, while I was drafting what was to become "Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism," written with Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna (Monthly Review, April 2011), I decided to take a look at Paul Sweezy's copy of the original 1942 edition of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which I had in my possession. In doing so, I came across a folded, two-page document, "The Laws of Capitalism," tucked into the pages. It was written in ink in Sweezy's very compact handwriting. In the upper-right-hand corner, Sweezy had jotted (clearly much later) in pencil: "(A debate with J.A.S. before the Harvard Graduate Students' Economics Club, Littauer Center, probably 1946 or 1947.)" The document consisted of a detailed outline, in full sentences, of a contribution to a debate. I immediately realized that this was Sweezy's opening talk in the now legendary Sweezy-Schumpeter debate. Until that moment, I, along with everybody else, assumed that no detailed records of the actual talks had survived.
May 1, 2011
Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, editors, Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and the Revolt from Below During the Long Seventies (New York: Verso, 2010), 472 pages, $29.95, paperback.
Rebel Rank and File is a collection of articles that surveys the building, heydey, and decline of rank and file workers' movement in the fields, mines, auto plants, schools, trucking and phone companies in the late 1960s through the 1970s. What makes this book so valuable is that the first half is devoted to detailing the context of these struggles—the political economy in which they were set. It begs the reader to look deeper into the basis of the book—bureaucratized unions, with leaders hell bent on maintaining power no matter the cost, who serve as buck privates in the Democratic Party army, and who need a compliant base every bit as much as the employers. The authors develop a number of interconnected themes: the single minded union strategy based on endless capitalist growth, parochialism, the private welfare state, pragmatism, anti-communism, influence of anti-war, black power and women's movements—all of which then help the reader to see similarities of the different rank and file experiences, no matter the work or union.
May 1, 2011
Nikhil Pal Singh, editor, Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 298 pages, $34.95, hardcover.
The story Jack O'Dell is one of the least understood but most important stories in the last half-century of the American Left; important because O'Dell, in his organizing and his writing for Freedomways magazine, contributed in crucial ways to the struggle against racism. But also little understood because the taboo on American Communism and Communists has prevented individual stories from the surrounding milieux to be appreciated and understood. This review-essay brings O'Dell back to light.
May 1, 2011
Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011) 264 pages, $29.95, hardcover.
Will Kaufman's new book, Woody Guthrie, American Radical, describes how Guthrie's life-long radicalism shaped his music and evolved over time—from the Great Depression to the Second World War, from the Popular Front to the McCarthyite witch hunts, and into the folk music revival of the 1960s. Kaufman argues that Guthrie's work must be understood in the context of its time, but also in light of Guthrie's commitment to socialist politics and his unrelenting opposition to capitalism and fascism.
March 1, 2011
I have written repeatedly on the structural crisis in the world-system, most recently in New Left Review in 2010. So, I shall just summarize my position, without arguing it in detail. I shall state my position as a set of premises. Not everyone agrees with these premises, which are my picture of where we are at the present time. On the basis of this picture, I propose to speak to the question, where do we go from here?
February 1, 2011
The long history of capitalism is composed of three distinct, successive phases: (1) a lengthy preparation—the transition from the tributary mode, the usual form of organization of pre-modern societies—which lasted eight centuries, from 1000 to 1800; (2) a short period of maturity (the nineteenth century), during which the "West" affirmed its domination; (3) the long "decline" caused by the "Awakening of the South" (to use the title of my book, published in 2007) in which the peoples and their states regained the major initiative in transforming the world—the first wave having taken place in the twentieth century. This struggle against an imperialist order that is inseparable from the global expansion of capitalism is itself the potential agent in the long road of transition, beyond capitalism, toward socialism. In the twenty-first century, there are now the beginnings of a second wave of independent initiatives by the peoples and states of the South.
February 1, 2011
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?"
May 1, 2010
Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam, translated by Anne Wyburd and Victoria Fenn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 518 pages, $35.00, hardcover.
In late 1970, prompted by the debate over the exposure of U.S. atrocities in the village of Mỹ Lai, an anonymous GI wrote a letter to Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, claiming to have witnessed hundreds of acts of terrorism by U.S. soldiers during Operation Speedy Express. The campaign, intended to reclaim portions of the Mekong Delta, purportedly killed over ten thousand enemy but seized only seven hundred weapons.
July 1, 2009
The "world food crisis" of 2007–08 was the tip of an iceberg. Hunger and food crises are endemic to the modern world, and the eruption of a rapid increase in food prices provided a fresh window on this cultural fact. Much like Susan George's well-known observation that famines represent the final stage in an extended process of deepening vulnerability and fracturing of social reproduction mechanisms, this food "crisis" represents the magnification of a long-term crisis of social reproduction stemming from colonialism, and was triggered by neoliberal capitalist development.
March 1, 2009
In the opening decade of the twentieth century the German national state united the great majority of the German speaking population of Europe, excluding only those in Switzerland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was among the leading states of the world. It boasted technologically advanced industry, among the highest per capita GDP, and the second largest army and third largest navy in the world. Germany was at peace, save for minor military operations against disobedient natives in Southwest Africa. It was a state that was among world leaders in providing basic social insurance, yet held sacred private property and the rule of law, except only in strictly prescribed areas of national security. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century the German national state unites the great majority of the German speaking population of Europe, excepting only those in Switzerland and Austria, its industry is technologically advanced and its per capita GDP high. Its military budget is the sixth largest in the world, and it is at peace, save for minor military operations against disobedient natives in Afghanistan. Despite cutbacks, few states in the world have better provision of basic social insurance, and Germany today prides itself on holding private property to be sacred and on its adherence to the rule of law, except for a few strictly prescribed areas of national security. In the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century the German national state committed crimes universally agreed to be the most horrendous in human history.
