September 1, 2000
Tony Hiss, The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 241 pp., $24, hardcover.
The View from Alger's Window is a fascinating book. Even if the father and son who share the stage in this memoir were completely anonymous, it would still be an absorbing story. Probably for most readers, however, and surely for almost all Monthly Review subscribers, the father's name will reverberate with what Jack Gelber's Nation review describes as a Nixon-manipulated “story of well-timed leaks, stage-managed press conferences, masterful misleading language.” But as the author himself says, a major objective of his work is to “transform Alger Hiss from a case to a person.” This he has certainly done
September 1, 2000
At the outset of this closely argued history of Mexican capitalism, James Cockcroft asks, “How long will the majority of Mexicans put up with being exploited on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border? ”
March 1, 2000
What do Helmut Kohl and Elián Gonzáles have in common? What could possibly unite the destinies of the huge former Chancellor of Germany, who for so many years dominated European politics and played the part of senior statesman on the global stage, and the little boy whose only political role so far has been as pawn in the hands of fading right-wing Cuban fanatics in Miami?
June 1, 1999
We celebrated our fiftieth anniversary with a dinner on May 7. It was a really marvelous occasion, and we were delighted to see so many of you there. The space was filled to capacity, with 350 people seated, and some who couldn't get seats at the tables were standing —just to enjoy the atmosphere. We were struck not only by the numbers that turned out but by the terrific spirit that permeated the whole affair.
May 1, 1999
This issue marks our fiftieth anniversary. We're sure our readers don't need to be told about the odds against a socialist magazine surviving through this particular half century. We began at a time when socialism was a dirty word in the United States, and we're still here today, in fact growing again, after a decade in which people have been abandoning socialism in droves.
December 1, 1998
Back in 1972, when one of us was living in Toronto, the Canadian national hockey team played a series of much publicized games against the Soviet Union. Horror of horrors, the Soviet team started winning. The defeat of Canada's favorites at its own national sport, and, worst of all, at the hands of Communists, was an occasion for some deep national soul-searching in the mainstream press. There were some astonishing editorials, which came very close to questioning the fundamental values of capitalism if it could so weaken the moral fiber of Canadians as to lead them to defeat by the Communist adversary at their very own game.
February 1, 1998
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.
November 1, 1997
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")
July 1, 1995
In 1902, the Rationalist Press Association issued a pamphlet entitled A New Catechism. Like the classic Roman Catholic statement of belief on which it was modeled, the document comprised a long list of questions and answers. However, the faith which it rehearsed was not belief in Christianity, but rather belief in secular human reason. The pamphlet opened with a stirring dedication:
We baptize the twentieth century—in the name of Peace, Liberty, and Progress! We christen her—the People's Century. We ask of the new century a Religion without superstition; Politics without war; Science and the arts without materialism; and wealth without misery or wrong!
July 1, 1995
Many people from divergent ethnic backgrounds, speaking various languages, and possessing different cultures now share a common experience of inequality in the United States. Yet there is an absence of unity among these constituencies, in part because their leaders are imprisoned ideologically and theoretically by the assumptions and realities of the past.
