December 1, 1997
The New Yorker dated October 20-27 carries, along with a generous menu of futurology, a sensational article on the past and present. It is entitled “The Return of Karl Marx,” by John Cassidy, who is self-identified as an Oxford-educated friend of “a highly intelligent and levelheaded Englishman whose career has taken him…to a big Wall Street investment bank.” Visiting with his friend at the latter's Long Island summer home during the early summer, the two discussed the economy and speculated on how long the current financial boom would last.
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")
November 1, 1997
I'm taking the liberty of appending this note because, though Du Boff and Herman's article is directed mainly at Bill Tabb, it refers to some of the things I've written about globalization.…Recently, I got a letter from Bill Doyle, who wrote, "After reading Ed Herman's comments in Z (magazine), I re-read your article and couldn't see why Ed was so exercised. I'd be interested to know if you see a substantial difference between the two of you, and, if so, what it is." Here, with some minor changes and additions, is what I wrote back.
October 1, 1997
We are writing at the end of August. The two main events of the summer have been (1) the apparent ending of the long stock-market boom of the last few years, and (2) the successful strike of the teamsters against UPS. Neither can be said to have been anticipated and together they point to the emergence of new trends in the period ahead.
September 1, 1997
In its most recent issue (July 17th) Doug Henwood's excellent Left Business Observer, now in its seventh year of publication, highlights what may come to be seen as an important turning point in current economic history. The gist of it is that Alan Greenspan and his supporters at the Federal Reserve have come to the conclusion that inflation is no longer a serious problem and the real threat today is deflation. "For all the bad press that inflation gets, deflation is generally far worse for all but the richest and best-positioned.…Greenspan and Co. might not fear an exact replay of the 1929-32 collapse, but clearly that's the 'it' that central bankers don't want ever to happen again" (to paraphrase the title of Hyman Minsky's classic book Can 'It' Happen Again?).
September 1, 1997
Much has been written about "globalization" in the last few years. It is not my intention to add to this literature but only to put the topic into the context of my own understanding of the history of capitalism.…Globalization is not a condition or a phenomenon: it is a process that has been going on for a long time, in fact ever since capitalism came into the world as a viable form of society four or five centuries ago; (dating the birth of capitalism is an interesting problem but not relevant for present purposes). What is relevant and important, is to understand that capitalism is in its innermost essence an expanding system both internally and externally. Once rooted, it both grows and spreads. The classic analysis of this double movement is of course Marx's Capital.
July 1, 1997
As of early summer the economic outlook for the rest of 1997, as portrayed in the major media, could hardly be brighter. "Strong growth with little unemployment and low inflation doesn't have to peter out….Could it possibly get any better than this?" exults Business Week (January).…Up to a point this is clearly a case of déjà vu all over again. A "new era" was widely and enthusiastically proclaimed by professors, pundits, and plain people as the stock market boom of the 1920s neared its peak. A few months later the market collapsed, and the greatest depression in U.S. history began. The big question now is whether the rest of the scenario of the 1920s and the 1930s is likely to repeat itself. The answer of the media and Wall Street and probably of plenty of plain people too is a resounding NO.
November 1, 1996
The September 30th issue of the New Yorker carried profiles of two long-time contributors to Monthly Review—lyricist E. Y. Harburg and lawyer Michael Tigar—evoking considerable pride among MR staffers. "Yip" Harburg, who died in 1986, wrote more than one hundred songs including "Over The Rainbow," and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime." Writer John Lahr notes that throughout his long career on Broadway and in Hollywood all of his work evinced powerful social concerns and themes of freedom. Yip, of course, was a socialist of the MR variety.
November 1, 1996
Victor Rabinowitz, Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer's Memoir (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 352 pp., $29.95, cloth.
Among the questions that divide my friends is whether it is possible that widespread revolutionary organization may someday occur even in the United States, the Belly of the Beast as goes a phrase all my fellow 68ers will recall. If you think the question deserves to be asked, then the history of the repression of the U.S. Left after the Second World War (and of what survived the storm) is worth your attention. After all, if this history is forgotten then the question is indeed not worth asking. How the ruling class of the United States manages its domestic repression is, in any event, of general relevance in many other places as well. Victor Rabinowitz at age eighty five offers a sharp, fascinating, and superbly written report on this question from inside that structured but flexible Great Intestine of the United States, its legal system.
November 1, 1996
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: and Chicago: Basic Books, 1995), 575 pp., $35.00, cloth.
A New York Times obituary for Sophie Reuther on February 23, 1996, declared her husband, Victor, a co-founder of the United Auto Workers. So now the myth that Walter Reuther founded the UAW is extended to include his brother. Unfortunately, the new biography of Walter Reuther by Nelson Lichtenstein will do very little to squelch the myth; this despite the fact that the book documents Reuther's career, warts and all.
