The first edition, comprised of sections on history, economics, politics, and philosophy, was unique in its scope and effectiveness. It engagingly made the case for the enduring value of Marxism as a guide to understanding and changing the world. I used the book for almost two decades in many courses, especially in the two-semester classical and contemporary theory sequence. The book, of course, did not produce miracles—Marxists do not believe in them—but it presented Marxism as reasonable and relevant, and it provided opportunities to discuss a range of vital issues. Over the years, many students said that Crisis and Change was their first and only meaningful exposure to Marxism, and that they would never again look at the world in the same way.

The second edition, Crisis and Change Today, retains the core structure and qualities of the earlier edition. At the same time, apart from updating to address subsequent crises – and more recent studies – the work conveys a more nuanced and circumspect approach, reflecting the dialectical necessity for both urgency and patience: the urgency of sharing core Marxist concepts at a time of global systemic crisis, and the patience that is required—given the collapse of earlier Marxist movements—to explain Marxism to new generations of students and workers and empower them to transform the world.

Crisis and Change Today, like the first edition, consists of four parts: They are (1) Base and Superstructure: Marx’s Theory of History, (2) Surplus Value: Marx’s Economics, (3) Class Struggle: Class, Party, and Political Theory, and (4) Applying Dialectics: Some Issues in the Philosophy of Science. (Revisions to Parts 1 and 4 are minor, reflecting the more settled character of Marxist work on history, philosophy, and scientific method; Parts 2 and 3, however, incorporate substantial updating.) At the end of each part of the book, the authors provide a summary consisting of six propositions. These twenty-four propositions are a comprehensive manifesto of a reaffirmed and updated 21^st-century Marxism.

The authors challenge students on page 1 with this clear bold sentence: “The central idea of Marx’s sociology is that it is possible and desirable to eliminate classes and nation states.” Sections 3 and 4 in Part 1 pose two fundamental questions: Have states always existed? Have classes always existed? The discussion encourages students to reexamine their assumptions about states and classes, to think sociologically about qualitative changes in societies, and to think “outside the box” of highly constrained liberal and conservative alternatives. Toward the end of Part 1, they ask: What are the dynamics of the modern world, and what are its fundamental problems? In section 8 they describe modernization theory and Wallerstein’s world system critique and introduce the concept of imperialism. In section 9 they focus on explaining alienation, thereby emphasizing the humanistic character of Marxism and making it easier for readers to see that Marxism is not economic determinism.

The questions in Part 2 take the reader step by step through an analysis of capitalist economics. The authors pose questions about commodities, surplus value, super-exploitation, overproduction, unemployment, racism and sexism, social mobility, and economic depression. The discussion of super-exploitation examines how low wages affect the incomes of better-paid workers, laying the basis for subsequent discussions of how racism and sexism affect all sections of the working class. Later the authors ask, “Who benefits from racism and sexism?” In a thoughtful essay, they contrast Marxist analysis with liberal answers to this question.

Knapp and Spector have added extensive updated material in the latter sections of Part 2, bringing in discussion of the financial crisis and the economic recession that began in 2008. They weave this updated information seamlessly into their general discussion. They conclude Part 2 by addressing the important question, “Why has the United States been ‘number 1’?” At this midpoint in the book, the reader has traveled through the capitalist economic crisis and an introduction to the world of global imperialism and has been challenged to think about how it all affects the working class.

Part 3 is a comprehensive effort to engage with the political challenges of the 21^st century. It begins with a penetrating discussion of the question, “What is the basis of a truly free society?” The authors then invite the reader to consider what political resources the capitalist class and the working class possess under capitalism. Midway through this part, they ask, “What is fascism?” They respond, “Fascism is the specific form of open terrorist rule by the state in the period of monopoly capitalism” (229). Their discussion of the nature and symptoms of fascism draws upon updated examples drawn from the US and all parts of the world today. It leads into a section focused on violence and social change.

The rest of Part 3 examines socialism and communism in the 20^th century. The questions posed are: What is a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? What are the main varieties of Marxism? Why did socialism collapse in the USSR and China? What does the collapse of socialist world powers mean for change? The discussion of varieties of Marxism is penetrating and well informed, fair and comradely. The analysis of why socialism collapsed in the USSR and China avoids clichéd factional polemics and offers a non-apologetic, hard-hitting Marxist explanation of socialism’s successes and failures. Today, when the history of communism has been buried under an avalanche of ignorance and propaganda, it is of no small significance to have a concise analysis and critique of that history that provides the basis for a qualified optimism about the future of Marxism and of humanity.

Part 4 is consistently stimulating. The introduction discusses whether dialectics is “a way of looking at the world” or “the way the world works.” The middle sections discuss whether social science is or should be “value-neutral,” and the nature of ideology. The authors present a critique of instances of “pseudo-neutrality” in textbooks. Like Marx, they suggest that most claims of neutrality are false, and that it is possible to be both objective and partisan on the side of the working class. For example, all beliefs about the causes of unemployment are ideological, in the sense of serving the interests of a particular social class. Yet ideological beliefs can be true or false, with false beliefs serving the interests of capitalists, while truthful explanations are ideologically of service to the workers.

Crisis and Change Today is possibly the best attempt by sociologists in recent decades to preserve and transmit the core of classic Marxism, and to make a contribution to humanity’s greatest need: equipping millions of people of younger generations with the knowledge, understanding, and commitment to organize and struggle for the end of global capitalism and the beginning of a worldwide egalitarian cooperative society.

Steven J. Rosenthal
Retired professor of sociology
Hampton University
steve-rosenthal@cox.net

For Marx himself, the period was one of personal sickness and destitution. But the economic crisis stimulated him to sharpen his examination of political economy, which he saw as finally creating the conditions for a new revolutionary period. The Grundrisse manuscripts, reflecting the systematic studies which resulted in Marx’s magnum opus, Capital, stand out among the most sophisticated analyses of capitalist economics. But not only that. In these manuscripts, Marx delved extensively into questions of method and provided an explicit account of the guiding principles of his research. His search for the correct method of presenting scientifically the real movement of capital was not merely a matter of imposing Hegelian parlance on the study of economic relations. On the contrary, Marx was “one of the leading political and economic journalists of his time” (Krätke, Chapter 10), and his search for the proper abstract categories to understand the world was accompanied by incisive observations on the rich totality of relations.

The life of the Grundrisse has been as interesting as the circumstances of its birth. Kautsky published the Introduction, presenting it as a “fragmentary draft” only in 1903. In 1923, David Ryazanov discovered the Grundrisse notebooks. The first edition in German appeared in 1939; the edition that included the whole notebooks was published in 1953. However, one had to wait until 1973 in order to read a complete English translation. The first examination of the text was Roman Rosdolsky’s The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ (in German), which set the framework for subsequent interpretations. Martin Nicolaus’s ‘The Unknown Marx’ appeared in New Left Review in 1968, popularizing the Grundrisse in the Anglophone world. Disseminated worldwide in many languages, the Grundrisse was read and interpreted, becoming a point of reference to further illuminate Marx’s thought on a variety of issues such as his relation to Hegel, the analysis of modernity, crisis theory, etc.

Musto’s volume is the most recent contribution to this corpus and a very important one. Its chapters discuss current theoretical and empirical issues in relation to the Grundrisse. It has already been translated into Farsi and Chinese, and its Japanese translation is forthcoming. The volume consists of three parts, following Eric Hobsbawm’s Foreword. The first part brings together eight chapters, each utilizing the Grundrisse to examine a different issue. The chapters that stand out are: Terrell Carver on the conception of alienation in the Grundrisse, Ellen Meiksins Wood on Marx’s understanding of pre-capitalist history and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, John Bellamy Foster on the ecological contradictions of capitalism, and Iring Fetscher on Marx’s sketch of post-capitalist society in the Grundrisse.

The second part of the book consists of three chapters that situate the Grundrisse in its historical context. Musto gives a rare bibliographical sketch of Marx during the years he composed the Grundrisse. Subsequent chapters by Michael R. Krätke are no less interesting. In the first, he focuses on Marx as a leading journalist of his time. This chapter is not merely bibliographical, as it establishes links between the content of Marx’s works and the context in which they were written. In the other chapter, Krätke brings our attention to the crisis situation of 1857-8, exploring how Marx conceptualized the crises of capitalism and related them to the revolutionary transition to socialism.

The third and final part of the volume presents histories of the dissemination and reception of the Grundrisse throughout the world. It describes the research undertaken in all the countries in which the Grundrisse has been translated. There are twenty-one chapters, each containing a bibliography of the complete and partial editions of the Grundrisse as well as the critical literature on it. This part especially reflects Musto’s remarkable ability as an organizer, who brought together Marxists from many parts of the world for this project.

The book, now available in paperback, is a “must” for every student of Marx. Its method of situating texts in their historical context will moreover be useful not only to students of Marx and Marxism, but to anyone interested in the social history of political theory.

Yasin Kaya
PhD student in Political Science
York University, Toronto
yakaya@gmail.com

Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital, geared primarily toward first-time readers of Vol. 1, is a useful and perhaps necessary compass for navigating Marx’s immensely rich but sometimes bewildering text. The Companion may likewise provide insights for seasoned readers (of Harvey as well as Marx). In this respect, Harvey has struck an effective balance between the theoretical rigour of Limits to Capital (1982) and his more conversational tone in works such as the The Enigma of Capital (2010) or A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007). The wide appeal of the Companion reflects Harvey’s intellectual trajectory. Having lectured on Capital for nearly 40 years, he draws a wide audience of students, scholars and activists. A series of these introductory lectures has been posted as a free online audiovisual course (www.davidharvey.org). The Companion is, for the most part, a transcription of these lectures.

It is worth noting that the Companion is merely the beginning of what Harvey calls his “Marx project.” Coordinators of the project are currently set to post similar audiovisual materials for Vols. 2 and 3 of Capital. All 13 of Harvey’s audio lectures on Vol. 1 can be uploaded to MP3 players or burned onto CD for easy listening. Video formats can be downloaded or streamed in real time. So it is little wonder that reading groups of Marx—intellectual pockets of resistance—are sprouting up all over the place. The next series of lectures will likely be translated into several languages.

On a purely functional level, the Companion and its audiovisual counterparts serve as excellent tools for individual readers, reading groups, seminars and lectures about Marx’s magnum opus. One could effectively read Capital with the Companion as a supplement during one intensive academic semester. It should be noted, however, that Harvey’s chapter-divisions do not precisely match those of Capital.

Moving to the content itself, the Companion provides a remarkably clear reading of Capital. The substance is never dull and rarely oversimplified. The goal is twofold: first, to provide students and activists with a “strong theoretical base” from which to launch their “practical engagements”; and second, to have readers “construct interpretations that are maximally meaningful and useful to them in the particular circumstances of their lives.” Harvey facilitates this process by introducing Capital “on Marx’s own terms” (1). That said, he also makes clear that he is presenting his “own distinctive point of view” of the text, and of the world more generally (viii). The Companion therefore is partly a guide, but partly also a piece of analytical work.

As a guide, it conveys the basic principles of Marxian dialectics and the manner in which Capital as a text—and capital as a process—continually expands through its inherent contradictions and interconnections. Harvey proves particularly helpful in navigating this complex process, beginning with the distinction between use value and exchange value and finally arriving – after 344 pages of Capital – at class struggle. Harvey’s acute attention to detail early in the book helps instill in readers a close and critical reading method. Aside from the useful diagrams provided in the Companion, there are frequent explanatory pauses, timely digressions, and insightful contemporary allusions.  One could say that while Marx is painfully digging toward the root of the problem, Harvey is serving as an assistant practitioner, easing an otherwise painful reading effort.

As a piece of analytical work, the Companion is most compelling when Harvey applies classical Marxist theory to contemporary circumstances, as when he cites investment guru George Soros to explain the limitless potential for capital accumulation. Such links help make Capital relevant and understandable to present-day readers. Harvey also relays a sense of intellectual exuberance throughout, which turns a potentially grueling experience into a pleasure for the novice reader. His radicalism is wonderfully provocative. In a period of political and economic uncertainty, it is refreshing to hear the Universal Declaration of Human Rights called “a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism” (49). Harvey does not shy away from suggesting that readers are “kidding themselves” if they think global warming can be curbed “without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined” (21). He seeks to challenge the reader’s basic understanding of the world, and he does a good job.

Still there is a danger of blurring the classical text with Harvey’s own unique analysis. This is only problematic insofar as it seems necessary to provide a clear distinction between the two, particularly for introductory readers. For example, Harvey offers a fascinating digression based upon a footnote in Chapter 14 of Capital. The footnote captures Marx’s dialectical method of thinking, but Harvey builds upon the note to develop a fairly unique theoretical apparatus in which various “moments” of the accumulation process interact (193-96). This serves as a central theoretical framework for Harvey’s latest publication, The Enigma of Capital (2010). Based on this framework, Harvey remarks,

Perhaps one of the biggest failures of the conscious attempt to build socialism and communism on the basis of capitalism was the failure to recognize the need to engage politically across all these moments in a way that was sensitive to geographical specificities (196).

Regardless of the validity of this perspective, this compelling theoretical digression adopts elements of Capital and pulls them onto fairly new theoretical and geographical terrain. This is Harvey writing, not Marx, yet it is not uncommon for members of reading groups to oscillate between quoting Harvey and Marx as if they were the same person. This is simply not the case. The real challenge then becomes shaking off Harvey’s reading of Marx, or at least attempting to distinguish between the classical ideas of Marx and the more recent contributions that Harvey provides. Readers should therefore read both Capital and the Companion from a critical perspective, rather than passively accepting Harvey’s reading. This is what Harvey tries to allow for, but responsibility ultimately rests with readers.

Readers may combine the reading of Harvey with the reading of Marx in any number of ways, each with its advantages and drawbacks. Harvey provides a strong foundation for reading Capital—particularly in the crucial opening chapters—but one should not rely too heavily on Harvey’s particular interpretation. Alternatively, one could abandon independent analysis altogether in favour of immediately applying Harvey’s work to practical ends. In light of the Great Recession and its overwhelming social and human fallout, the latter course has its appeal. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

As it stands, the Companion serves as a rich and timely contribution to critical scholarship. Harvey’s radical interpretation of the world will be of great interest for scholars and activists who strive for a fundamentally new society.

Matthew Brett
M.A. Political Science
Concordia University, Montréal, Québec
brett.matthew@yahoo.ca

Terrorism consists of “acts of violence against civilian targets in the attempt to … instill fear in the general population and disrupt government functions” (83). Bolender cites CIA director Richard Helms’s list of US-sponsored terrorist attacks, but key to this policy was that these acts “would not be publicized, recognized or acknowledged outside of Cuba,” so that Cuba’s response to them could be “portrayed as paranoia, totalitarian and evidence of the repressiveness of Fidel’s regime” (14). In addition to revealing this terrorist war to the US public, Bolender shows us the human faces of its victims – unarmed citizens going about the routines of daily life – through their own testimony.

The glue holding these stories together is found in Chapter 1, where the author explains the motivation for some 800 terrorist acts since 1960, the personal toll of which is calculated at 3,478 dead and 2,099 injured. After the 1961 defeat at the Bay of Pigs, US policy was directed at forcing the Cuban government “to use precious resources to protect itself and its citizens [as] part of the overarching strategy of making things so bad that the Cubans might rise up and overthrow their government” (13). Chapter 2 details the actions of Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch in planning the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, as well as the US government’s role in instructing and protecting them. Bosch said of the 73 victims, “There were no innocents on that plane” (29). Haymel Espinosa Gómez, whose father (the plane’s co-pilot) was killed in the blast, talks about the residual effect of the violence 34 years later – the absence of peace or justice in her family’s life. Jorge De La Nuez talks about his rage and resultant social problems produced by the childhood trauma of losing his father and not understanding why anyone would do such a thing.

The random nature of terrorism is revealed in the rash of hotel bombings from April to September 1997. Once again Posada Carriles was involved in orchestrating the acts that injured dozens and killed Fabio DiCelmo, a 32-year-old Italian businessman who died at the Hotel Copacabana when a shard of glass struck his jugular vein. Fabio’s father, Giustino, decided to move permanently to Cuba and opened a pizzeria in his son’s name. He is 87 years old and outspoken about terrorism: “The US government has for the past 50 years been torturing Cuba, why? The country is no military threat. The only difference is the system.… No one in the US knows about these terrorist attacks against Cuba, they only know the bad things” (57).

Terrorism can take various forms. Operation Peter Pan is an example of psychological terrorism. Peter Pans are children born in Cuba but whose parents abandoned them by sending them alone out of the country after being persuaded (by the Catholic Church and by US propaganda) that the communists would take their children away and indoctrinate them. It is estimated that between 14,000 and 25,000 children were affected by Operation Peter Pan. Some 14,000 children were sent to the US (often to orphanages or abusive homes) and their siblings were obviously affected. The separations caused tremendous emotional turmoil and animosity, often pitting family members against each other for life.

On the night of October 12, 1971, the town of Boca de Sama in the northern part of Holguín in eastern Cuba was attacked by fifteen men from the Miami-based terrorist group, Alpha 66. Many Cubans know the story of Nancy Pavón who was 15 at the time. Her right foot was destroyed by gunfire while she tried to escape. Her subsequent life has been an ordeal – first fighting for survival through multiple surgeries and later living with the disability incurred from the attack. A day does not go by that she does not relive the horror of dragging the remains of her foot while fleeing the gunfire.

Other chapters deal with attacks on Cuban fishermen, attacks on young teachers during the 1960-61 literacy campaign (14 dead), the March 1960 bombing of the French vessel La Coubre in Havana harbor (100+ dead and 300 injured), the 1961 bombings of Havana department stores, and attacks from November 1962 through January 1963 in Matanzas on the mobile cinema programs. The horror of these attacks documented by the victims themselves is not easily forgotten. One is driven to ask, how can such terrorism be prevented?

The last chapter deals with the Cuban response to counterrevolutionary terrorism. “To combat these organizations (centered primarily in south Florida) there has been only one choice – to send intelligence agents to penetrate the Cuban-American organizations in an attempt to gain information and warn the Cuban government of impending plots. Cuba has used these methods for almost as long as the terrorist war, increasingly so in the 1990s when they felt particularly vulnerable following the collapse of the Soviet Union” (219f). In 1998 a group of Cuban intelligence agents in Florida was apprehended by the FBI. Five stood trial in Miami in 2000-01. The judge sentenced the Cuban Five to a total of four life terms plus 75 years. The trial was long, complicated, and a tragic study of how the political climate  can affect American jurisprudence. Given the history of relations between the US and Cuba for the past 50 years, the outcome was not surprising.  Reading Voices from the Other Side allows us to understand the context for this tragedy.

Gail Lindenberg
New York, NY
industrialigera@yahoo.com

 Annalies Laschitza’s Introduction gives detailed information on the correspondence, the history of its preservation during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and the important role played by publication of some of the letters in the renewed appreciation of Luxemburg, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. (Stalin had put her under a cloud for decades by labeling her a “semi-Menshevik” and calling for a “struggle against Luxemburgism.”) Shriver’s “Translator’s Note” is useful, as are the glossary of names, lists of abbreviations and of contemporary periodicals, explanatory footnotes, and a reasonably thorough Index. Also of interest is a note listing the archival locations of the originals. The main thing I found lacking was a chronology of Luxemburg’s life, which would clarify the circumstances under which the letters were written (many were from prison). A detailed Table of Contents, listing each letter, would also have been helpful. Overall, however, Verso is to be congratulated for producing a splendid scholarly work.

The letters themselves are a literary treat. Although Rosa Luxemburg was a highly political person, her letters are anything but narrow political commentaries, and this is where her “multidimensionality as a thinker and a person” comes fully into play, as noted by Peter Hudis in his Introduction. Interestingly, most of the correspondence here consists of personal letters to friends and lovers, where the political commentary (which is quite extensive) enters casually, as the shared discussion and understanding among intimates. While it is not surprising that she would have active friendships with Sophie Liebknecht, wife of left-winger Karl Liebknecht; Henriette Roland Holst, left-wing socialist in Holland; and Clara Zetkin, leading left-wing German socialist, Luxemburg also remained close personal friends with Luise Kautsky, wife of Karl Kautsky, even after she had broken with him politically (in 1910), and with Mathilde Wurm, wife of Emmanuel Wurm, both social-democratic centrists in the USPD.² Not that Luxemburg pulls her political punches—for indeed there is much direct criticism of Karl Kautsky and other leading members of the SPD, and of the SPD’s deadly routinism and lack of imagination, as well as an honest assessment of the enthusiastic revolutionary youth attracted to the Spartacus League but untried by experience (in this way much like the enthusiastic but untried 1960s New Left youth in the US and elsewhere). And she is highly critical of Lenin in several of these letters. Yet there always remains a civility even in her sharpest criticisms of leading personalities, a determination on her part to separate the ideas which she opposes from the actual persona of the person expressing them.

Further, by certain standards that have been much in vogue for decades on what it means to be “left political,” Luxemburg is positively “bourgeois”! She has an active interest in botany, she eagerly takes up drawing and painting, and she loves walking in the gardens of her residence, in the Black Forest, and in Switzerland. She enjoys without condescension the daily life she observes during her stays in Genoa and Levanto, Italy, and writes of those places at length in two letters to Luise Kautsky. She greatly appreciates Goethe and Mozart, mentioning them several times. And she deeply regrets that when her father was dying she was at the International Socialist Conference in Paris, not by his side. Luxemburg is also an avid reader of the novels of her day, very fond of her cat Mimi, and often ends her letters with notes of love from both Mimi and herself. Finally, while imprisoned in the Wronke fortress, she befriends and feeds the titmice that come to her window ledge, and eagerly observes the flowers that grow and the small animals that scurry beneath her cell window.

Of course there’s much that’s directly political in the usual left-wing sense and much that is revealing about the inner life of the socialist parties of Luxemburg’s time. But these are scattered throughout the correspondence as bons mots; while integral to each letter in which they are contained, they are not systematic attempts to formulate political documents and polemics as such. These letters remain above all intensely personal; the political enters into them because her friends and lovers are themselves also political, so the focus is natural.

Moreover, Luxemburg’s letters are extremely well written, elegant in their use of language and exciting in their expression of ideas. They show just how much we have lost with the decline of letter-writing. E-mails may be more timely and direct as means of communication, but taking the time to actually correspond (as Luxemburg did throughout her life), to actually compose a letter, produces art as well as communication. That is what’s at the heart of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, and what makes the book so absorbing.

The letters paint a vivid self-portrait of their author, both as a revolutionary socialist and as a fully-rounded, highly accomplished, educated (Ph.D. in economics), intelligent person who worked her way up to the top echelons of the SPD and was a key player in the Second International despite the triple handicap of being a woman, a Jew, and an ardent left-winger who chafed at routinism and bureaucratism. While not a feminist as generally understood today, Luxemburg definitely viewed women’s emancipation as part and parcel of the liberation of the working class as a whole through socialism, and certainly was so actively pro-woman that she is justly admired by many present-day feminists. Further, while broadly supportive of Bolshevik positions, she was also critical of the Bolsheviks and of Lenin specifically, and a fierce critic of the Bolshevik use of terror following the revolution, even as she conceded that it resulted from Russia’s backwardness and the failure by European socialism to support the first workers’ state. Luxemburg herself died, of course, in a revolutionary attempt to overthrow capitalism in Germany.

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is a remarkable volume, one that we are truly blessed to have. A paperback version is forthcoming.

George Fish
Indianapolis
georgefish666@yahoo.com

Notes

This work is relevant to a wide range of theoretical traditions. Those interested in Marxist-feminist critiques of productivity and work under capitalism will find that Gulli’s ideas have much in common with their own, because this book begins where his earlier work on productive and unproductive labor left off.¹ Feminist and Marxist-feminist readers will invariably note that Gulli arrives via a different theoretical route at similar conclusions about how capitalism genders and undervalues certain labors. Those interested in ontological critiques of individuality will find this book a must. Those engaged in the struggle over privatization and adjunctification of US universities will find chapter 4 a robust and accessible critique of the superexploitation of academic labor. Those who are in disability studies will want to know how Gulli sutures Kittay’s ideas of dependency with his critique of the productive labor regime and in the process synthesizes the idea of an economy of care. Those interested in the Marx of the Grundrisse may wish to explore how Gulli takes up the position of living labor in reference to thinkers who are sometimes counterposed against Marx, such as Nancy, Agamben, Deleuze, and Bataille. Scholars who work against the orthodoxy that separates Marx and Agamben will find this text invaluable.

Earthly Plenitude is divided into two parts, ‘Critique of Sovereignty’ and ‘Sovereignty and Labor.’ In the first part, Gulli explicates critiques of sovereignty while outlining how these relate to his political ontology of labor. He begins with Marx’s famous line: the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. For Gulli, this statement invokes individuals but does not reaffirm the liberal idea of individuality. Gulli argues that we must understand “the philosophical nature of this ‘each’” (4), which ultimately requires that we “avoid reducing everything to the individual, its autonomy and liberty” (7). So Gulli’s first claim is to remind us that we are not dealing with the commonly held conception of the individual. “To guide our analysis will be instead, the thisness of everyday life, the constant and various individuation of the most common… The most important aspect is the absence of any hierarchical structure of domination, the notion of sovereignty. I call this singularity, or the dignity of individuation,” writes Gulli (4, emphasis in text).

It is only after this anti-liberal reading of individuals that Gulli begins to address sovereignty in the way we most commonly think of it, as command, as unassailable power wielded against others. He notes that Leibniz, contra Hobbes and Bodin, claimed that there was no such thing as a totalizing unitary power. Instead Leibniz theorized a division between the power of empire and that of God. For Gulli, you can’t have a qualification to supreme power and still have a theory of supreme power. But this then presents the dilemma where positive law (the law of so-called sovereigns) is separated from natural law. It is a dilemma because it takes us right back to essentialism and traditional metaphysics.

In order to avoid such a return, Gulli brings the problematic into his reading of labor. If positive law is the legal system that legitimates the sovereign’s most egregious abuses of power and natural law is the law that surpasses the sovereign’s dictates, exposing their illegitimacy, Gulli argues that it is labor – rather than some universal code – that makes possible the act of de-legitimizing the sovereign. He understands labor, however, in a very broad sense, as implying “not strictly the working activity, such as in the factory, but all doing constituting, producing the social” (18).

Perhaps in anticipation of some confusion as to what he means here, Gulli uses John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s 1996 film La Promesse all to exemplify his claim. This is a moment in the text where Gulli’s fluid breadth is on full display. For Gulli, John Brown and his insurrectionists worked with a universal, plural, natural law in mind, but it is not a universal in the metaphysical sense. It is universal “because it is not done in isolation, and it could not be done in isolation” (22). These conclusions lead to one of the most profound passages of the book. Gulli writes, “Thus a new community emerges, beyond the law: the community that repudiates slavery, the king’s unjust law, the boss, the father, and the system of exploitation of migrant labor. It is the community that repudiates sovereignty” (22, emphasis mine). This clarifies to a degree, yet it remains a challenge to fully grasp the force that is now signified by “community.” But to Gulli’s credit he is working against our most ingrained assumptions about universalism, individuality, and labor.

The second part of Earthly Plenitudes begins with a chapter on exploitation in the privatizing public university system. Gulli unequivocally takes up both learning and teaching as labor, showing how he views the concept of labor analytically. Students, he says, “are certainly not consumers. They are producers, and they are consumed” (106, emphasis in text). Meaning, of course, that they are consumed by capital. This differentiates Gulli from writers and university labor activists who argue that classroom knowledge has become a commodity and that the student has been reduced to the status of a customer. For Gulli, if our goal is to “go beyond the concept of sovereignty in all its forms” (107), then we need to recognize the hierarchical power structure manifested in universities, and see how students are “much more like inmates, or patients in a hospital” (106). As for faculty, the trend toward contingency or flexibility is a move to make them more productive for capital accumulation than under the system of tenure.

In the final chapter Gulli takes up feminist critiques of unproductive labor and disability studies critiques of liberalism, in order to present a “general economy of care” (138). When Gulli writes about a care economy, or labor of care, he is not talking about affect in the vein of Hardt and Negri. Rather, he is taking up a Marxist-feminist stance that denounces capitalism’s undervaluation of ‘unproductive’ labor. Here Gulli builds directly on his earlier work, in which he articulates a conception of labor as encompassing essentially all human activity (“life itself”).²

Further, he grounds this chapter in volume 3 of Capital, where Marx argues that freedom begins “only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends” (quoted, 134). Gulli does not interpret this passage crudely as if we need to leave behind the realm of necessity, the realm of caring for, feeding, teaching, and creating the conditions of life for each other. The relationship here is not one of separation. In this critique he argues that we need to eradicate the division of labor that forces some to work in an undervalued realm of necessity while others appear to escape such work and so appear to have real freedom. Indeed, Gulli writes, “it is evident that domination and slavish labor (that is, sovereignty and productivity) cannot end until men start doing women’s work on a regular basis and women’s work itself ceases being women’s work” (139).

So the general economy of care is certainly not an economy that applies the logic of sovereignty and productivity to the work of caring for individuals – making all care work commodified and potentially productive for capital. This is not desirable for obvious reasons. Gulli writes, “It is as important to realize that the solution cannot lie in making all unproductive labor productive, but rather in eliminating the distinction as such” (143).

At 158 pages of text, Earthly Plenitudes is not a long work. But it covers a lot of ground, as it moves from Leibniz’s critique of Hobbes to the transformations of academic labor to disability theory. This makes it a challenging read, but especially rewarding for those who follow the text in its entirety and take seriously the author’s underlying ontology of labor.

David Spataro
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
dspataro@gc.cuny.edu

Notes

In his influential book, The Nature of Prejudice (1954), Gordon W. Allport concluded his first chapter by listing five possible reactions to the behavioral impulses set in motion by “negative attitudes.” These range from the “least energetic to the most.” The first and least energetic involves simply expressing one’s attitudes in words. The remaining four involve action: avoidance, discrimination, physical attack, and extermination. While racism was widely prevalent in the United States when Allport wrote this book, there was virtual consensus among scholars that prejudice was best thought of as a social problem requiring not only research but programs, primarily educational, designed to reduce and ultimately eliminate its more pernicious effects by modifying attitudes and correcting beliefs.

It followed that any serious attempt to understand racism would be essentially therapeutic in its approach, which meant that certain social facts were to be taken for granted as basic to social order and independent of how that order is expressed. Racially oriented beliefs and attitudes were, like blemishes on the skin, removable or could at least be effectively hidden. The proper treatment would begin by clarifying the specific intentional structure that was at the heart of the problem. Having identified and isolated this structure, therapy might involve education, which was the favored approach, or it might involve changing the conditions of association along racial lines, an approach thought to be most effective but difficult to administer. Other strategies were also tried, some of which, like those derived from studies of authoritarianism, relied on the hypothesis that racism’s sources are deep within the personalities of racists. But no matter how complex one’s view of personality and whatever one might have believed about the way in which prejudicial attitudes are situated in the psyche, there was general agreement that one could treat such attitudes, given that they could not be justified and that they were specific enough to treat one by one.

The second axis of inquiry into the causes and foundations of racism focused on the institutional forces at work in supporting and reproducing racialist logic and racist inclinations (see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, 1967). In this perspective, the identification of “institutional racism” was a first step toward understanding the sociological and social-psychological dimensions of the problem. Society itself was seen as in some deep way racist. Racism thus threw into question many of the ordering principles that sociologists had attributed to society. It became necessary to consider the hypothesis that the inherent reproductive processes of society – seen as logically and functionally prior to racism – provided in their very generality a ground for the continuation of racism in America.

Steve Martinot’s book takes this literature a step further and makes a compelling case that racism is a necessary, unavoidable, outcome of the construction of whiteness as a standard of socialization (individual development within society) and as an identity. The problem as he sees it, then, is not race but whiteness as such, or “white supremacy” conceived of not as an extreme but as all that can be normal in a society committed to that standard and to the identity-formations justified by it. Having reviewed commonly held notions of “race,” Martinot introduces his project as follows:

Nevertheless, it is insufficient to say that race is a social construct. That statement defines not a fact but a task. The task is to describe the structure that has been constructed socially. If “race” is a structure of social activities, practices, and meanings, we have to describe how that structure conducts or directs those activities, as well as how it gives them the meanings they take. Our task is to describe the contours of this structure, beyond the well-known and well-worn ideological notions of “racism,” so we can see it (32).

But he carries the argument beyond the limits of this statement, to the point at which a number of important non-obvious implications emerge that can no longer be avoided and that challenge conventional reformist politics. Among them are that attitudes are not generally important in explaining racism. Rather, racism is evident in the sense of naturalness or normality with which white people experience their lives. This sense is confirmed moment by moment as a result of living in a society geared to validate whiteness at all cost. The intentionality of white supremacy, the way it appears as normal, morally significant, and socially relevant is, from this point of view, not something that can be separated from the personality as a whole and from the social structures in which alone individuals derive their identities, feelings of efficacy, and sense of autonomy.

As I understand Martinot, racism is immanent to our experience of individuality and to the relations that give that individuality its apparent authenticity and moral force. It is immanent because that experience is socially constituted within the frame of reference of whiteness (and, therefore, white supremacy), which, he claims, can be understood as a “cultural structure of racialization.” In this regard, he concludes that

though enacted with respect to people of color, racism is ultimately a relation between white people. That is why arguments concerning racism’s effects on its victims fall so typically on deaf (white) ears; such arguments are addressing the wrong relationship. White people apprehend how they act as natural because they see it through the eyes of other white people. To act white is to act out the elements of white racialized identity, within the ethic of white hegemony (176).

Other implications of his thesis that he examines have to do with the limits of reform, the mutually reinforcing relationship between racism and sexism, and the relationship between the culture of racialization and the current turn – especially since 2001 – toward an exclusively reactionary politics. Even without those, this is a disturbing book, in part because it is so relentless in its attempt to leave no “white stone” unturned, to leave no room for even a hint of a claim of exemption for anyone identifying as white. There is a moral aspect of this as well, in the same way certain holocaust scholars tried to sustain an idea that grew out of the 1970s, of a “holocaustal universe.”

If the argument about a “holocaustal universe” had any moral or explanatory weight in regard to the exterminations of the 1940s in Europe, Martinot’s book suggests strongly that it should have equal weight in regard to the sort of racism that continues to exist in the United States and that now appears to have left behind the language that could potentially reveal it, even to its practitioners. A prima facie case in support of this suggestion came at a talk I attended some years ago, delivered by one of our most distinguished and respected African-American scholars to a racially and religiously mixed group. I was struck by his use of the word “genocide” to describe what has been happening to young black people. The fact that no one objected, including another speaker who had defended Israel as her part of the colloquium, gave further weight to that description. The mere use of a word seemed to leave no room for exceptions, even for those among us who had been dedicated activist opponents of racism and injustice.

Similarly, Martinot pursues his reader with seemingly endless arguments aimed at showing that none of us stand outside of the culture of racialization and its effects; the very sense of being spontaneous in our decision to enter that struggle is compromised. However, Martinot does not say that such a decision is thereby invalidated or made worthless. This is part of his own approach toward writing in a morally defensible way. That approach, beyond the amount of information put forward and the rigor of the author’s argument, is a compelling feature of this book.

Michael E. Brown
Northeastern University
mikebrown29@rcn.com

Morgan’s account captures the spirit of the 1960s, an era which is often regarded as another “springtime of the people.” Mainstream treatment of the ‘60s has been tainted with distortions, inaccuracies, and ideological agendas. Despite the attempts of corporate media and conservative politicians to discredit this era, it remains a contested time that still shapes political discourse, as illustrated by John McCain’s feeble attempt, during the 2008 presidential campaign, to connect Barack Obama to Bill Ayers.

To young people today the 1960s are a fascinating period. I have had students remark that they wish they had lived through this period. Others have suggested that their current efforts to promote social change can never live up to the activism of those years. Still others wonder whether the whole era has been romanticized by those who lived through it. Many people now suggest that it is important for Americans to get beyond the 1960s, and they blame this era and its continuing influence for much of what has gone wrong in the US since that time.

This is where Morgan’s book makes its finest contribution. It tries to place the 1960s in its larger context, looking both forward and backward to analyze exactly what occurred and how events have been appropriated and distorted by elites. Morgan does not romanticize the period, nor does he simply provide a left-wing defense of the era. Instead, he demonstrates that the backlash against the 1960s and the demonization of this time-period was an essential component of an elite strategy to reconstitute capitalist hegemony.

Morgan does a wonderful job of demonstrating that ideological hegemony is a lived experience which constantly needs to be reproduced and reworked in the face of alternative perspectives. He makes clear that the vilification of the 1960s arose not from a conscious plot but simply from the normal operation of capitalist institutions experiencing a legitimation crisis. The mainstream media did not need to be prompted to distort what happened. The journalistic norms of fairness and balance resulted in a safe and seemingly apolitical account of events that consistently reflected elite interpretations. As journalists strove for upward mobility, they understood the rules of the game and the boundaries of argument. In so doing, they gave little voice to points of view that challenged the accepted limits of discourse.

Morgan makes a similar argument with respect to other institutions – cultural, social, educational, philanthropic – that were “naturally” inclined to reinforce the existing social arrangements and to marginalize left-wing arguments. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Morgan gives a dialectical analysis of why it was essential for the US ruling class to attack the 1960s and reestablish social control. As he makes clear, this was not easily accomplished by elites. There were discussions among panicked businessmen and politicians in the early 1970s. prefiguring Reagan’s cultural war against the ideals of the 1960s, which was later continued through the administration of George W. Bush.

A crucial document which prompted many discussions is the memo drafted in 1971 by Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce. This document argued for concerted action by elites to retake the initiative and to orchestrate a broad institutional response to the 1960s. Powell called for business to go on the offensive and to fund a political backlash in the media, in the political arena, and in cultural and educational institutions. The goal was to blunt, and eventually to repudiate, the values and ideals of the social movements of the 1960s. To accomplish this shift did not require collusion. The capitalist class responded as a class. The political backlash which followed was not a product of plans put together by just a few individuals. It was a predictable response by elites who felt threatened by the mass resistance they encountered in the 1960s and early 1970s.

As Gramsci argued, and Morgan concurs, reproducing hegemony is always a struggle. The 1960s represented a sea change in America in terms of citizens becoming conscious of social injustice, government lying, and the barbarity of a permanent war economy. Hence the legitimation crisis. The elite counterattack manifested itself in a one-sided class war waged through a variety of social, cultural, educational, political, legal and economic institutions. The elites did not get all that they wanted, but they were able to attack and reverse many progressive reforms rooted in the struggles of 1960s, as well as the 1930s. The rightward move would be continued in subsequent years, right up to the present.

The targets for elites in America since the mid-1970s make up a wish list of what they wanted to reverse from the 1960s. These include, as Morgan points out, overturning the “Vietnam Syndrome,” curbing excess democracy in America, defeating the labor movement, establishing the boundaries for legitimate media discourse on race, class, and gender, promoting the corporatization of higher education, and co-opting or repressing existing social movement organizations. In addition, elites promoted a political backlash against the 1960s by encouraging the creation of a “Bad Sixties” frame and the icons that go with it, as well as domesticating the 1960s through commodification and cultural co-optation. In sum, the goal of American elites was nothing short of reconstructing the past and constructing the future.

As the author concludes, the alternative view of the 1960s constructed by the right wing became part of a larger narrative which would provide a comprehensive explanation of what went wrong in America and how it could be put back on track. To win the cultural and political war from the mid-1970s to the present, it was first necessary for the right to systematically distort what occurred in the previous decade. This was accomplished by highlighting its excesses and by distorting, for generations to come, what people were fighting for, what the counterculture was about, and the goals of the civil rights, women’s, anti-war, student, environmental, and gay liberation movements.

It was a tall order even for elites who controlled the dominant institutions in America, but this concerted attack on workers’ rights in the economy, on the democratic process and on social, cultural, and educational institutions was necessary from an elite perspective in order to defend existing social arrangements. Morgan weaves a compelling account of the battles that ensued, showing how the mass media culture contributed greatly to restoring elite control. The results have been disastrous, as democracy has been eviscerated, inequality has increased, struggles for social justice have been thwarted, and the permanent war economy rolls on.

In the final chapter, entitled “Media Culture and the Future of Democracy,” Morgan suggests that the power of a good example has been lost to generations growing up after the 1960s, for they have been deprived of the knowledge that people can stand together and take history into their own hands. And, perhaps even more devastating, young people have been stripped of hope. The struggle continues to see clearly through the fog of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies promoted by the capitalist class in its cultural war against the 1960s. This is an important project and Morgan’s book makes a critical contribution to redefining history and building a counter hegemony.

Peter Seybold
Department of Sociology
Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis
pseybold@indiana.edu

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of scholarly work on genocide. Thanks to this intellectual attention, we now have a plethora of international institutes, programs, and centers devoted to this topic. As academics have institutionalized this new area of investigation, public awareness of genocide appears to be at an all-time high. Apart from the many Human Rights organizations, we have all heard glum-looking celebrities (George Clooney, Don Cheadle, and Bono) plead with us to get involved and help end the brutal massacres in far-off lands. And, with a little surfing of the web, one can easily purchase a “Remember the Rwandan Genocide” T-shirt or a “Radovan Karadzic must pay for the Srebrenica Massacre” sweatshirt. Best of all, on April 29, 2007, New Yorkers could contribute to the International Rescue Committee by eating at a “Dining for Darfur” restaurant. Genocide, it appears, has become a plaything for liberals.

In an era where political enemies of the United States and its clients are demonized as being the second-coming of Adolf Hitler (e.g., Yasser Arafat, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Omar al-Bashir), one would think that all this study of and action against genocide is a good thing. Unfortunately, not all genocides are created and treated equally. Herman and Peterson’s Politics of Genocide provides a concise critique of the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of both genocide scholars and activists. Their book is unique in that it injects politics and analysis into a discussion that usually turns on psychology, culture, or warfare. Although genocide is a political act, much analysis of it is resoundingly descriptive and apolitical, rarely moving beyond localized ethnic/racial conflict and territorial disputes.

The authors situate their discussion of genocide by considering both the geopolitical concerns of the United States and the country’s “exceptional” place within the international community. US foreign policy since World War II has been directed toward maintaining its dominant global position. The success of American transnational corporations has been tied to US support for local elites (or dictators) who ensure that popular demands do not interfere with continued exploitation. If elites cannot do the job, US military intervention follows; the authors report that the US intervened in twenty-nine different countries between 1945 and 2009. Most important, in the eyes of the US public, these interventions were “normalized” via the country’s self-perception as being morally superior and above international law. Echoing a position that Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman expressed in 1973, the authors reiterate that the US has been “the most important single instigator, administrator and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths…” (16).

The authors’ key argument is that regardless of how genocide may be defined internationally, legally, or politically, the term has been applied so recklessly that the crime has actually been debased. Because there is no meaningful “threshold of scale,” identifying genocide becomes a matter of who did what to whom. The designation of genocide, then, is influenced by the “atrocity management” of political officials, the mass media, NGOs, and genocide intellectuals. Atrocity management was seen historically in the genocide denial associated with US aggression and violence against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but it is also alive and well today. One of the key aspects of Herman and Peterson’s argument is the importance of political selectivity in assessing today’s crimes of aggression and mass killings.

In order to see recent political selectivity in action, the authors rely on an analytic framework to distinguish among the many different types of genocide. For Herman and Peterson, genocide can take four main forms: it can be Constructive (done by the United States and serving its interests); Benign (carried out by US allies and clients); Nefarious (violence committed by enemies of the US); and Mythical (it did not happen, but we said that it did). For each case, concrete examples are presented and the words and actions of genocide scholars and activists/officials are considered. In addition, the authors attempt to illustrate the amount of atrocity management and propaganda by contrasting the number of deaths within a location against the media’s use of the signifier genocide.

While the authors’ overreliance on atrocity numbers/media references is a weak part of the book, their use of examples is authoritative and clear. For example, both US/United Nations sanctions against the Hussein regime and the subsequent US invasion and occupation of Iraq were cases of a Constructive genocide. In the invasion/occupation, the death toll (more than one million dead) and the displacement of people was great, yet, the suffering of the Iraqi people, the illegality of the occupation, and destruction of the nation were all ignored. US aggression against Iraq did not count as genocide; it was only the price required to subdue a troublesome regional power.

Some examples of Benign genocides include those of Israel against the Palestinians, of Croatia against the Serbs, and of US client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala against their civilian populations. In each instance, mass atrocities occurred, but no action was taken and very little criticism was offered since the perpetrator was western friendly. Herman and Peterson also argue that Mythical genocides can be engineered to achieve political objectives. They claim that a non-existent 1999 Račak massacre in Kosovo, in which 45 villagers were alleged to have been killed, was the key turning point in getting NATO to authorize airstrikes against the Serbs.

Nefarious genocides, those atrocities carried out by the enemies of the US, are all well known and seemingly straightforward – they include Darfur, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Yet, in the book’s most interesting chapter, Herman and Peterson explore the ways in which the managers of atrocity have engaged in political storytelling to depict conflicts in a specific manner and, in some cases, to force the international community to intervene. According to the authors, for example, the conflict in Darfur has been falsely racialized as involving an Arab government terrorizing Black African Sudanese. In terms of gravity, however, political violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is much more severe than that seen in Darfur. But the government in the Congo is not Islamic, and the United States and its allies already exploit the country economically. Politically, with the world’s attention on Darfur, western violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the Gaza Strip was largely ignored. In Bosnia and Kosovo, Serb aggression and violence was inflated to further the NATO attack on and dismantling of Yugoslavia. The authors also raise troubling questions about the actions of the pro-Western Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Paul Kagame, which killed thousands of Hutus per month in 1994 and was a driving force in the conflict. Yet, western apologists maintain that Paul Kagame is the Abraham Lincoln of Africa.

In all, Herman and Peterson have produced a book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. But it is not without some drawbacks. First, the authors do not define genocide in a formal way and they appear to use “bloodbath” as a synonym. They are not the same thing. A more nuanced definition of genocide would keep the book from being reduced to an exercise in body counting, and it would make their arguments more compelling. Second, the book’s brevity is problematic. While everyone (especially students) loves short books, sometimes the subject matter deserves a more thorough treatment. Regardless of whether the genocide is Constructive, Benign, Nefarious, or Mythical, the history and the violence that the authors are analyzing are complicated, and the analysis must acknowledge this. The role of the Serbs in Bosnia and the Janjaweed militia in Darfur needs a fuller treatment than they were given. Finally, there is nothing in the book that deals with prevention, or how to stop genocide (regardless of the variety) once it is underway. It is not good enough to say that the inability of the US establishment to recognize the human and material destruction of Southeast Asia and the Middle East is an intellectual and moral failure.

The Politics of Genocide makes clear that in the attribution of genocide, body counts are irrelevant – the only thing that matters is power. Historically and today, the processes of genocide are used as a window through which to identify US allies and enemies. And in the case of Iraq, NGOs, political officials, the media, and genocide intellectuals have created an image in which destruction of persons is matched only by destruction of the truth.

John O’Connor
Department of Sociology
Central Connecticut State University
oconnorjohn@ccsu.edu

Capital and Its Discontents brings to the printed page fifteen interviews conducted by Lilley for radio. They are rightly called “conversations,” as the astute interviewer presses hard questions in order to get hard answers. This is particularly important because events since the onset of the “Arab Spring” seem to have overwhelmed, or at least put on the back shelf, the dark notes of radical pessimism that nearly and sometimes completely overwhelmed Marxists, anarchists and Greens alike until little over a year ago.

Lilley wants her interviewees to see deeply, without losing sight of goals that have become well-nigh invisible. Sometimes in the outcome, the pessimism is too heavy, because thinkers like Tariq Ali want so badly for listeners and readers to drop the later 20^th-century paradigms of “liberation” – capital challenged on all sides by nationalist-minded insurgents of the Third World allied to radical students in the West. The market, armed by US military force above all, came, saw and conquered as the Soviet Bloc fell, leaving us all in a new place. Not in all respects a worse place, but definitely a different one.

But what is this place, and how has it changed? Vivek Chibber, another of the deep pessimists, epitomizes the close look at the “national capitalism” that started with a vision of socialist planning but seemingly demanded an alliance with the developing capitalist base of underdeveloped economies, squeezed the countryside for low-priced resources (human and otherwise), and built industry from the bottom up. It looked good on paper, all the “growth.” In the end, however, workers’ movements and most of the middle classes were sidelined, and capitalism won out, although in places like South Korea it was a well-controlled capitalism successfully using the power of the State. Here we are now, for instance in India (Chibber’s homeland), with sixty years or more of socialist planning if not down the drain, then unrelated to socialist objectives of a cooperative economy. “Development” successfully squeezed the countryside for cheap labor and resources, with all the consequences we know so well by now.

David McNally offers another side of the same coin in his analysis of the ongoing crisis of profitability and the near-total financial bust of 2007-09. Sinking profits since the 1970s prompted the financialization of the economy. The resulting crises should open new paths of resistance. The US, losing its commanding lead in the global economy, went off the gold standard, placed its future into in the hands of high-prestige swindlers, given ballast in the short run by military power but in the process doubly undercut – or so it now seems. McNally suggests that the Left put forward cooperative “stimulus” ideas, echoing the “sewer socialism” of a century ago. Good idea, but less than no luck so far, as privatization of remaining public resources marches onward.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, with her deep Marxist mastery of early capitalist history, gives us a succinct and sometimes surprising view of the rise of Empire, going back to Roman times. The Romans developed their empire through the spread of private property, a big innovation, as the Dutch commercialized national holdings well over a millennium later. The English replaced the ties of blood with the ties of property, out in the countryside, which eventually gave them a national strength unparalleled. She argues that full-blown imperialism emerges only after the Second World War, because only by then was the world prepared to be completely conquered. At that, global capital can’t manage the system, and national capitals have their own competing interests. Chaos hides behind an infinite number of smaller contradictions.

Many of the other interviewees follow these logical paths, but in different ways that make all of them interesting and fruitful to read. Among the most unusual, I count John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review editor and eco-socialist savant. He argues that 20^th-century Marxists, for the most part, threw out the Enlightenment baby with the War Science bathwater. That is: Lukács and other big thinkers pushed scientific questions aside as inherently utilitarian, alien to their own vision of revolution. In doing so, they unintentionally avoided Marx’s own fascination (he wrote his thesis on Epicurus!). Marx sought a holistic understanding of the contradictions of capitalist phenomena, such as the absorption of the medieval British countryside and its inhabitants into quasi-modern society, with enormous suffering and destruction (one wishes that Marxists and particularly Engels had listened more to what William Morris was trying to tell them about hedgerows and such).

Where does all that lead us? It’s not exactly a fair question, because so much of what we see in front of us now has happened in just the few months since this book went to press. As the final entry—an interview with libertarian thinker Andrej Grubacic—reads, there really is no strategic clarity for the Left. More troubling for Gruabacic (most of us outside of the InfoShop world would not necessarily have noticed) is that the revival of anarchism during the 1990s is now itself badly out of date.

What we have seen in Wisconsin (where this reviewer lives and cheerfully takes part in the struggles) is a big “NO!” to loss of existing rights and services, accompanied by an enormous amount of spontaneous creativity in many different venues (a large portion of these being humorous by intent), adding up to a great education in struggle, if no strategic conclusions. The strategy is to defeat what is in front of us; and the learning process includes a realization of how little alternative the Democrats have to offer to the Republican offensive. Avowed anarchists are few, avowed socialists hardly more numerous among the 100,000 or more people in motion. Jolly beer drinkers are many, along with families of all ages and types, all seemingly eager to chant “What’s Disgusting? Union Busting!” and yet more hopefully, “THIS is what democracy looks like.” That is, ourselves.

I am hoping some of these 100,000 will find their way to Capital and Its Discontents. It would do them a lot of good.

Paul Buhle
Madison, Wisconsin
Paul_Buhle@Brown.edu