Reading
Monthly Review
by
Barry Weisleder
Lately, I’ve taken the
opportunity to catch up on my reading of Monthly Review, one of the finest
socialist publications you will encounter. Like every other one, it has
strengths and weaknesses. Yet every edition I’ve seen has at least one or two
articles worth reading and noting well. To
encourage enjoyment of its bounty of useful information and analysis by a wider
readership, I wish to draw attention to just a few articles published in MR in 2007.
A good place to begin is the
survey of the biggest country in Latin America, five items grouped together
under the heading “Brazil Under Lula” in
the February edition. It constitutes a cautionary tale about the co-optation of
the PT from a “workers’ party” into an instrument for domestic bourgeois
enrichment and political hegemony, and its use of revenue from a booming
resource sector to fashion a passive popular support base through income
transfer programmes, the renown “Bolsa
Familia.”
While dutifully paying off
usurious “loans” to the World Bank and the IMF, the Lula regime plundered the
pension funds of state employees, and for good measure engineered labour law “reform” that undermines the independence of
unions, allows firms to recruit strike breakers, and keeps the minimum wage
below the level required for survival. Land reform is thwarted, and peasants
who take direct action to seize farm land have suffered fatal consequences.
“Israel
in the U.S. Empire,” by Bashir
Abu-Manneh, is the Review of the Month in March 2007,
critically examining the emergence and limitations of “post-Zionist” thought
amongst Israeli academics, while providing a compelling chronology of the
tragedy of Palestinian bourgeois nationalism.
It points out that, on the one
hand, “Israeli interventions have ended up pushing the whole geopolitical
alignment of the Arab elite into the American sphere. And that has been an
enormous and sustained effort. Control of oil in and of itself cannot achieve
that: the United States needed an activist warring state to help it perform
this task. For this service Israel has been substantially rewarded” (in the
form of huge U.S. subsidies and successive waves of territorial expansion — BW).
On the other hand, “The PLO
aborted the Intifada…legalized the occupation, and
became Israel’s colonial enforcer.” This helps to explain the rise of Hamas, along with a further evolution of imperial policy.
“Once
a Cold War ally against nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism has turned into a
foe.” “The Muslim Brotherhood is an example of the latter. It
went from being supported by Israel against nationalist Fatah,
to mutating into Hamas and becoming the main agent of
anti-colonial struggle and Palestinian self-determination in the Occupied
Territories.”
The “militarized and
fundamentalist Israel” fostered by the U.S., in the process, has accelerated
colonialism, buried even the illusion of the “two-state solution,” and I
believe, may unleash a new stage of mass anti-apartheid Palestinian actions of
the kind seen recently both on the fortified Gaza-Egypt border and inside
Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.
In “Socialist
Strategies in Latin America,” in the September edition of MR, Claudio
Katz argues that the collapse of both the USSR and of the neo-liberal
prescription for Latin America opened a new period for the left and for class
struggle on the continent.
What Katz calls “the novel
strategic problem: the general presence of constitutional regimes” presents
both a challenge and an opportunity — “unforeseen access to government by left
nationalist or radical reformist presidents who are rejected by the
establishment.”
The author reminds us that “The
dominant classes do not give up power…. For this reason, any policy that
indefinitely postpones the anti-capitalist goal ends up reinforcing oppression.
Socialism requires preparing and consummating anti-capitalist ruptures.” Reformists propose “winning space within the institutional
structure,” while revolutionists “promote parallel organs of peoples’ power.”
Katz correctly insists that more than a social movement is needed to lead and
consolidate the decisive rupture with capitalism. Nothing less than a
revolutionary party is required to play a leading role in the process by which
the working masses win power and transform society.
“Dual Power in the Venezuelan
Revolution” by George Ciccariello-Maher, in the same
edition of MR, maintains that the formation of communal councils (to be endowed
with fiscal autonomy) in Venezuela, is deepening a revolutionary situation, somewhat
reminiscent of Russia in 1917, and standing in stark contrast to Lula’s
Brazilian project. Will the grassroots power of workers, farmers and the urban
poor, organized in independent councils, replace the bourgeois state? Will the
new United Socialist Party of President Hugo Chávez become a sufficiently
coherent, programmatically and strategically revolutionary instrument to lead
the rupture and transformation envisioned? Only time will tell. But Chávez, unlike
Lula, is openly and vigorously agitating for both the councils and the party
required, and moreover is strategically allied to revolutionary Cuba.
“The
Dismantling of Yugoslavia” by Edward S. Herman and David
Peterson is a 60-page opus that dominates the October edition. It argues
persuasively that the U.S.-induced NATO assault on Bosnia and Serbia was
hypocritically premised on a double standard and was designed to pave the way
for extended U.S. military unilateralism, as occurred de facto subsequently in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Where the article gravely disappoints is in its tendency
to discount the responsibility of the Milosevic regime for collaboration with
ethnic cleansers, and in the authors’ failure to explain fundamentally the
breakdown in social solidarity across Yugoslavia that was the precursor to its
dismantlement.
We are treated to a rather
elliptical formulation of the preceding “internal and external factors” at work,
including “the economic disparities that no amount of state planning and
redistribution ever countered,” along with “the loss of the wartime generation
of leaders (which) left fewer defenders of socialism as well as federalism.” This
approach absolves the Stalinist team centered on Tito of its responsibility for
decades of bureaucratic, top-down rule, for dismantling the planned economy
itself, and for facilitating the privatization that fostered massive layoffs, emigration
and foreign debt.
The demise of Yugoslavia
exemplifies, once again, how imperialism and Stalinism reinforce one another, not
how the latter resists the former. Residual confusion on this point contributed
to the weakness of the global left and workers’ movement in opposing the U.S./NATO
intervention, not a “Western liberal-left intellectual and moral collapse” (as
stated in the article’s sub-title by the authors.)
“More Unequal — Aspects of Class
in the United States” by MR associate editor Michael Yates
in the November edition, is the introduction to his book of the same name
published by Monthly Review Press in 2007. It examines media establishment
accounts of “The glaring increase in economic inequality evident in the United
States over the past thirty years.” So-called explanations
that attribute this outcome largely to technological change (computers) or to
government policies (Republican rule), are shown to be superficial and evasive
of the realities inherent in the capitalist mode of production.
Yates probes the reasons “for
the lack of class consciousness in the United States and its brethren
capitalist nations” in the nexus of state and nation, especially in the context
of “the impact of scores of years of nationalism within the world’s biggest and
most aggressive imperialist power,” as “occurs in all the rich capitalist
nations.”
Until we discover “how we may
break out of this consciousness impasse…the class
divide will continue to grow and the conditions of the working class will
continue to worsen.”
In “China,
Capitalist Accumulation, and Labor” (MR, May 2007), Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett de-bunk the so-called success
story of “now predominantly capitalist” China.
They record how “China’s
growth has been driven by the intensified exploitation of the country’s farmers
and workers, who have been systematically dispossessed through the break up of
the communes, the resultant collapse of health and education services, and
massive state enterprise layoffs.” They add that “China’s gains have been
organically linked to development setbacks in other countries.” And: “Finally, China’s
growth has become increasingly dependent not only on foreign capital but also
on the unsustainable trade deficits of the United States.” The accumulating “national
and international imbalances…are bound to require correction at considerable
social cost for working people in China and the rest of the world.”
It should never be forgotten
that the 1949 Chinese Revolution was the precondition and the launch pad for a
massive industrialization process, the infrastructural gains of which are now being
usurped — increasingly by foreign capital.
Loss of sovereignty and
economic dependency historically go hand in hand. So, while “the share of
foreign manufacturers in China’s total manufacturing sales grew from 2.3 percent
in 1990 to 31.3 percent in 2000,” the fact is that China “does not in any real
sense manufacture…[high technology] goods. Rather it
assembles them from imported parts and components. For example, domestic value-added
accounts for only 15 percent of the value of exported electronic and
information technology products. All the rest is import content.”
China is thus reduced to being
a supplier of cheap labor, while its working population is “being forced to
battle conditions very similar to those in Latin America.”
From 1990 to 2002, jobs in
state and collective enterprises fell by 59.2 million, while non-state
employment rose only by 24.1 million. That represents a decline in formal
sector employment of 34.1 million. “Thus, growing numbers of Chinese workers
have been forced to accept irregular employment which, with an increase of 80 million,
now comprises the largest single urban employment category. A growing share of
this irregular work is accounted for by China’s burgeoning sex industry. While
the Chinese government says there are 3 million prostitutes nationwide, independent
estimates put the figure at up to 20 million (with sex work accounting for up
to 6 percent of China’s GSP) once sex laborers in massage parlors, entertainment
establishments, and even barber shops and beauty salons are properly included.”
The trend towards worker
displacement into irregular employment is unfolding across East Asia, including
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. It exemplifies the infamous “race to the
bottom” — what economist David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by
dispossession” (the separation of workers from access to the conditions
necessary for their production and reproduction). It is a process not limited
to early capitalism, “but is rather integral to the system’s ongoing historical
development especially in its latest, neoliberal
phase.”
Hart-Landsberg
and Burkett conclude: “Seen from this perspective, it is clear that the answer
to worker problems in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere for that matter, is
not to be found in supporting policies designed to replicate capitalism’s so-called
Asian success stories. Rather it lies in building national and international
movements with an accurate understanding of, and a commitment to overcoming, the
dynamics of contemporary capitalism.”
The above and other MR articles can be read on-line at: www.monthlyreview.org. I highly recommend that you pay the site a visit.