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Where Have All the Farmers Gone?
The United States was a land of farmers, from first settlement to the industrial revolution that took off in the 1830s. European settlers, mainly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, were overwhelmingly farmers, peasants, from generations of the same. They came to North America for land to farm. With the support of the British colonial institutions, […]
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Global Capitalism in Danger
Global capitalism is in danger. Leading lights of global finance capital are sending out warning signals with growing urgency and desperation. Alan Greenspan is puzzled, referring to the decline of long-term interest rates at a time of rising short-term interest rates as a “conundrum.” To solve the conundrum, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times argues, […]
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South Korea: The Unraveling of an Economy
South Korea, the poster country for the IMF in the post-East Asian crisis period, is in serious economic trouble. That’s probably why you hear so little about what is happening there. After a major economic collapse in 1998, the country recorded GDP growth rates of 10.9 percent and 9.3 percent in 1999 and 2000, respectively. […]
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Koizumi Goes Postal
On Monday, August 8th, Japan’s upper house of Parliament unexpectedly joined the French and Dutch electorates to give a sharp slap to neoliberal inevitability. Much to the totally delicious distress of all the usual suspects, from the Financial Times to the Christian Science Monitor, the parliamentarians turned down Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s key piece of […]
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Japan’s Modern Historical Loop
The news of world affairs these days is highly unlikely to delight the Japanese survivors of the two nuclear terrorist attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States’ armed forces sixty years ago. Those attacks were not meant to convince the Japanese leaders to surrender, something which they were about to do anyway, but […]
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Vermin and Souvenirs: How to Justify a Nuclear Attack
Because Japan chose to invade several colonial outposts of the West, the war in the Pacific laid bare the inherent racism of the colonial structure. In the United States and Britain, the Japanese were more hated than the Germans. The race card was played to the hilt through a variety of Allied propaganda methods. Spurred […]
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A “Better Occupation” of Iraq?
It would be a mistake to say that it was inevitable that the US would fail in its putative mission of “liberating” Iraq or transforming it into a viable democracy, for that would be deterministic. It would not be incorrect to state that it was practically inevitable, however. And why that is so tells us […]
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Voluntary Slavery
Although the widely celebrated consumer sovereignty allows people to choose whether to consume Coke or Pepsi, nobody could even dream of suggesting that workers can act as sovereign individuals within their place of employment. Ideologists mouth comforting platitudes that depict people as sovereign individuals in their role as consumers, but obviously ultimate control of the […]
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Taking Games Seriously
Why should self-identified progressives and activists care about videogames? After all, don’t we have more important things to do — like stopping the Terror War, organizing unions, and constructing Left parties? Aren’t videogames just a frivolous luxury of First World consumers? Not so. Adorno noted long ago that the line between progress and regress becomes […]
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An Interview with Samir Amin
MRZINE: In your essay in the November 2004 Monthly Review entitled, “U.S. Imperialism Europe and the Middle East,” you conclude that, “Europe will be of left, the term ‘left’ being taken seriously, or will not be at all.” As opposed to the views of almost all U.S. and U.K. commentators, are not then the “non” […]