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Speech The Sage of Imperialism: At 90, Harry Magdoff has Made His Marx by Susan Green » About RECENT ESSAYS ON: BACK ISSUES: April 2003 March 2003 February
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January 2004, Volume 55 — Number 8 c o n t
e n t s Historical materialists are not
prophets; they do not predict the future course of history. They are concerned
rather with the present as history. This fundamental principle of
Marxist thought is called to mind by our reencounter recently with a common
misinterpretation of Lenin’s Imperialism. In his new book, The
New Imperialism, David Harvey writes (p. 127): “I therefore think
Arendt is...correct to interpret the imperialism that emerged at the end of the
nineteenth century as the ‘first stage in political rule of the
bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism’ as Lenin depicted
it.” (See also Harvey’s piece “The ‘New’
Imperialism” in the Socialist Register, 2004, p. 69.) REVIEW
OF THE MONTH This year Cuba will be celebrating the forty-fifth anniversary of its victorious revolution: a great historic achievement. And when we bear in mind that the Cuban revolution—the long sustained action of a nation of just eleven million people—survived for forty-five years against all odds, successfully confronting the declared enmity, the U.S.-dictated international political encirclement and economic blockade, as well as the ever renewed attempts to subvert and overthrow the post-revolutionary order by the world’s most preponderant economic and military power, even this simple fact puts forcefully into relief the magnitude and the lasting significance of the ongoing Cuban intervention in the historical process of our time. We are all contemporaries to an achievement whose reverberations reach well beyond the confines of the tendentiously propagandized “American Hemisphere,” offering its hopeful message to the rest of the world. Food Security in
Cuba In 1996, Via Campesina, the recently formed international umbrella organization of grassroots peasant groups, introduced the term “food sovereignty”: the right of peoples and states to democratically decide their own food and agricultural policies and to produce needed foods in their own territories in a manner reinforcing the cultural values of the people while protecting the environment. After Neoliberalism:
Empire, Social Democracy, or Socialism? Since the early 1980s, the leading capitalist states in North America and Western Europe have pursued neoliberal policies and institutional changes. The peripheral and semiperipheral states in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, under the pressure of the leading capitalist states (primarily the United States) and international monetary institutions (IMF and the World Bank), have adopted “structural adjustments,” “shock therapies,” or “economic reforms,” to restructure their economies in accordance with the requirements of neoliberal economics. European Labor: The
Ideological Legacy of the Social Pact Europe’s trade union movement is on the defensive. It is also in a deep political and ideological crisis. At present, the trade unions are unable to fulfill their role as the defenders of the immediate economic and social interests of their members. They have lost ground in all sectors and industries. What was, in the post–Second World War period, the strongest and most influential trade union movement in the capitalist world is today openly confused, lacks a clear vision, and hesitates in its new social and political orientation. Ironically, the same theories, analyses, and policies which gave it its strength in the postwar period have now become a heavy burden. The ideological legacy of the “social pact” is now leading the trade union movement astray. DOCUMENT The U.S. embargo against Cuba has been condemned by a growing number, by now an overwhelming majority, of member states of the United Nations General Assembly. However, it remains in force by the U.S. government's isolated but stubborn will, in spite of repeated UN injunctions, notably its resolution 56/9 of November 27, 2001. The purpose of this exposé is to denounce this embargo in the strongest terms as a violation of law, and for its total lack of legitimacy. These measures of arbitrary constraint are tantamount to an undeclared act of war by the United States against Cuba; their devastating economic and social effects deny the Cuban people the ability to exercise their basic human rights and are unbearable for them. They directly subject the people to extreme suffering and infringe upon the physical and moral integrity of the whole population, inflicting the greatest harm on children, the elderly, and women. In this respect, the embargo can be seen as a crime against humanity. BOOK
REVIEW A review of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby. Ralph Miliband: A Public Individual
A review of Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left by Michael Newman. |
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