October 1, 1999
Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (New York: Arcade, 1999), 349 pp., $27.95, cloth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's old adage, about measuring a civilization by reviewing its prisons, if followed in the U.S. context, is a condemnation of this nation's own version of the gulag archipelago. A cross-section of prisoner's writings submitted to the PEN writing contest for the past quarter-century reveals the cold, dark underside of the American dream. Men and women, denizens of both state and federal prisons, write brilliantly about trying to stay human in the midst of places of marked inhumanity, and indeed, places that only succeed if they dehumanize
September 1, 1999
Our choice of political strategies clearly depends in large part on what we think is possible and impossible in any given conditions. And what we think is possible or impossible under capitalism obviously depends on what we think capitalism is. So let me, first, make some general observations about the nature of capitalism
September 1, 1999
I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”
July 1, 1999
In his article on the U.S. economy in this issue, Doug Henwood quotes from a piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, and points to the connection between Friedman's view of globalization and his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Well, we read that article and were very much struck by it too. Anyone who thinks we're over the top when we say things like Ellen did in June's Review of the Month about the “new imperialism” should just read Friedman's “Manifesto for the Fast World.”
July 1, 1999
If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continent's southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production. Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it
July 1, 1999
Two propositions dominated the Marxist perspective in most Asian countries during the period immediately following the Second World War. First, capitalism had entered the period of its “general crisis.” While not reducible to narrowly economic terms, this implied that economic progress would henceforth be stymied. Second, the kind of diffusion of industrial capitalism that had occurred from Britain to Europe, and then in the United States and other temperate regions of white settlement in the period leading up to the First World War, could not be expected to occur in the third world as well. It followed from these two propositions that the development of the Asian countries required their transition, through stages of democratic revolution, to socialism, and that the course of this transition would be made smoother when their proletarian comrades from the advanced countries marched to socialism as well, as they eventually would
July 1, 1999
As we take our first steps across what Bill Clinton likes to call the bridge to the twenty-first century, we're hearing a lot of praise for the state of the U.S. economy. The word “boom” is frequently used, as is the phrase “the best economy in a generation.” Wall Street economist Larry Kudlow, one of the most exuberant of his breed, calls it “the only adult economy in the world.” The United States, we're told, is a natural to succeed in this post-industrial era—fast, flexible, polyglot, and decentered
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.
June 1, 1999
Robert Brenner,
The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950-98 (Special issue of
New Left Review, no. 229, May/June 1998), 262 pp.
It is tempting perhaps to attribute all the problems of capitalism to excessive competition. After all, capitalism is generally presented within contemporary ideology as a system which is nothing more than a set of competitive relations governed by the market. Is it not possible then that the economic contradictions of capitalism, and indeed the present world crisis, can be explained in terms of the globalization of competition which now knows no bounds, and is undermining all fixed positions, resulting in a kind of free fall? This seems to be the view of the distinguished Marxist historian and social theorist Robert Brenner in his ambitious attempt to account for the present global economic turbulence
June 1, 1999
Two years ago, the tectonic plates of the world economy shifted. Within a matter of months, the crisis in Thailand had engulfed East Asia. Global financial markets were rocked a year later when Russia defaulted on forty billion dollars in foreign loans. Just as markets were starting to shrug that one off, economic panic hit Brazil this January, sending stock markets crashing and knocking down the country's currency, the real, more than 40 percent. Pundits are no longer asking if another country will be next, but who will be next
