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Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, BEN LADEN: LA VÉRITÉ INTERDITE (Paris: Denoël, 2001)

Published two months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this book aims to reveal "the forbidden truth" about Osama Bin Laden. Brisard, author of a report on al-Qa'ida for the French Directorate of Territorial Security, and Dasquié, an investigative journalist, draw on discussions with government officials, diplomatic records, published and unpublished newspaper articles, financial documents, and other sources from several countries. Perhaps the most important "hidden truth" that emerges from the authors' research is the centrality of corporate oil interests in the development of U.S. policy toward Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.

The most widely publicized section of the book recounts U.S. State Department efforts to limit the Federal Bureau of Investigation's pursuit of al-Qa'ida during the last five years. Although State Department officials have since denied making any such efforts, the authors' primary source was John O'Neill, a former Deputy Director of the FBI. Brisard reports that he first met O'Neill in Paris in June, 2001, and that he had extensive private discussions with O'Neill in New York City on July 22-23, 2001. According to the authors, O'Neill expressed deep anger over U.S. diplomats' blocking his attempts to probe the ties between al-Qa'ida and its supporters in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.

O'Neill played an important role in investigating the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As the authors disclose, O'Neill indicated that the Saudi government had thwarted his efforts to document the connections between Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida operatives in his home country, by executing the perpetrators of the 1996 attack before they could be interrogated by the FBI. The authors also state that O'Neill harshly criticized the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen and the State Department for preventing his team from obtaining on-site evidence of al-Qa'ida's involvement in the attack on the USS Cole.

How did O'Neill explain the U.S. government's obstruction of his investigation? As the authors recount, the former FBI Deputy Director blamed the U.S. oil companies and their allies in the State Department. O'Neill reportedly told Brisard that "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama Bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia." O'Neill's investigation had led him to the same conclusion that the authors had reached through their research-that the notion of Bin Laden as a Saudi renegade was a "myth" and that Bin Laden continued to enjoy the religious and financial support of a significant section of the Saudi royal family. As O'Neill explained to Brisard, Washington was determined to protect the Saudi government and U.S. economic interests in Saudi oil, even if this required restricting the FBI's pursuit of al-Qa'ida.

One of the great ironies in this story, noted by the authors, is the fate of O'Neill himself. Embittered by his recent experiences, O'Neill retired from the FBI and became Security Director for the World Trade Center in August, 2001. Along with more than twenty-eight hundred other people, he died there on September 11. But Brisard and Dasquié explore in considerable detail another irony of this historically unprecedented attack on the U.S.-that the Bush Administration had been engaged in secret negotiations with the Taliban regime between February and August, 2001. As the authors make clear, while the U.S. government denied diplomatic recognition to the Afghan regime and publicly criticized its religious fundamentalism and repression, it was quietly seeking an agree- ment with the mullahs which would further longstanding U.S. economic and political objectives in that country.

Brisard and Dasquié explain that U.S. business leaders and government officials have long been interested in the extraction and marketing of Caspian Basin oil and natural gas but have generally opposed the construction of pipelines through Russia or Iran for economic and political reasons. Consequently, UNOCAL and other U.S. oil companies have wanted to build pipelines which could transport oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. But the civil war and political instability which followed the collapse of the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan prevented any significant corporate investment there. As the authors point out, when the Taliban first seized power in 1996, U.S. business leaders and government officials believed the new regime could provide stability and become a reliable partner in pipeline projects. Brisard and Dasquié document the extensive corporate and diplomatic negotiations that took place between the U.S. and the Taliban from 1997 to 2000. The authors observe that these discussions eventually failed, partly because of the Afghan regime's unwillingness to curb its oppression of women and partly because of its equivocation over the U.S. demand to expel Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida forces.

According to Brisard and Dasquié, the new Bush Administration restarted these negotiations in February, 2001. In the authors' judgment, the fact that several top Bush Administration officials have close ties to U.S. oil companies explains their commitment to reaching an accommodation with the Taliban. It is well known that President Bush hails from a family long involved in the oil business and that Vice President Cheney was formerly Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, the giant oil services company. But Brisard and Dasquié also point out that Condoleezza Rice served as a member of the Chevron Board of Directors and a Chevron representative in Central Asia pipeline negotiations in the 1990s. The authors note, too, that Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham are former executives with Tom Brown, Inc., another energy corporation.

Despite the absence of official U.S. diplomatic relations with the Taliban and the imposition of United Nations sanctions against the regime, Bush Administration officials participated in bilateral and U.N.-sponsored discussions with Taliban represen-tatives for several months. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, met with Central Intelligence Agency and State Department officials in March, 2001. He was accompanied by Laila Helms, the niece of former CIA Director Richard Helms and a public relations expert employed by the Afghan government.

Over the next several months, U.S. and U.N. officials met with other Taliban representatives in Washington, Berlin, and Islamabad. As Brisard and Dasquié explain, U.S. negotiators sought to "decouple" Bin Laden from the Taliban and persuade the mullahs to invite other Afghan political forces to join their government. According to the authors, the Bush Administration promised the Taliban a sizeable share of the revenues from U.S. pipelines through Afghanistan if they would surrender Bin Laden and form a government of national unity. When the Taliban eventually rejected these demands in July, 2001, U.S. officials threatened to take military action against them. Former Pakistan Foreign Minister Niaz Naik, who was present at this meeting, quotes U.S. officials as telling the Taliban, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."

Brisard and Dasquié report that the last U.S.-Taliban meeting took place in Islamabad on August 2, 2001, when Christina Rocca of the State Department reiterated U.S. demands to the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan. Less than six weeks later, terrorists linked to al-Qa'ida destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and inflicted significant damage on the Pentagon. The authors' account of the U.S. military threat to the Taliban and disclosure that U.N. official Francesc Vendrell had met exiled King Zaher Shah in Rome to discuss conditions for his return to Afghanistan provide grounds for conjecture that Bin Laden may have authorized a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.

Brisard and Dasquié's impressive first-hand reporting and careful research make an important contribution to the literature in this field. Indeed, this book is an indispensable guide to understanding Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida, U.S.-Saudi relations, and the historical context of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Several recent developments confirm the centrality of corporate oil interests in U.S. policy toward Central Asia. After the Taliban regime fell, the Bush Administration handpicked Hamid Karzai to head the new Afghan government and named Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American, as U.S. special envoy to Kabul. Both Karzai and Khalilzad are former UNOCAL consultants who will probably "make things even smoother" for the resumption of the pipeline project in Afghanistan (Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2002).

As Daniel Fisher observed in Forbes Magazine (February 4, 2002), "It has been called the pipeline from hell, to hell, through hell," but "now, with the collapse of the Taliban, oil executives are suddenly talking about it again." On February 11, the Irish Times revealed that Karzai had made a one-day visit to Pakistan, where he announced that he and General Musharraf had discussed the proposed Central Asian pipeline "and agreed that it was in the interest of both countries." Karzai hopes to sign an agreement for a two-billion dollar gas pipeline when he meets with Pakistan and Turkmenistan officials in late May (BBC, May 13). Mohammed Alim Razim, the Afghan Minister for Mines and Industries, told Reuters that work on the project is expected to begin shortly after the agreement is finalized.

Although former FBI Deputy Director O'Neill's explosive disclosures on the State Department's obstruction of his investigation cannot yet be independently corroborated, it may be only a matter of time before such evidence emerges. On May 9, 2002, in Washington, D.C., FBI Agent Richard G. Wright filed a federal lawsuit claiming that "FBI management intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed" his investigation of suspected Hamas affiliates in this country. Wright claims that the agency prevented him from pursuing criminal investigations which could have disrupted Hamas operations in the U.S.-and their funding by Saudi interests. He also accuses the FBI of violating his First Amendment rights by prohibiting him from publicizing his criticisms. Wright has reportedly written and is seeking to publish a 500-page manuscript entitled Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission (James Grimaldi and John Mintz, Washington Post, May 11).

Finally, the supposition that al-Qa'ida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in anticipation of a U.S. military strike against Afghanistan appears increasingly plausible. Jonathan Steele and his colleagues, citing the above-mentioned U.S. ultimatum disclosed by former Pakistan Foreign Minister Naik, concluded that this "raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Center.and the Pentagon out of the blue ten days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats" (Guardian, September 22, 2001).

On May 17, 2002, the Bush Administration publicly acknow- ledged that it was already planning to issue a "National Security Presidential Directive" against al-Qa'ida before September 11. As correspondent Jim Miklaszewski indicated on NBC Nightly News (May 16), this directive makes clear that the U.S. fully intended to use military force against Afghanistan unless the Taliban surrendered Bin Laden-and would have done so even if the September 11 attacks had not occurred. Miklaszewski observed that the Bush Administration's subsequent rapid military response was possible because it merely had to take the plans "off the shelf." Tragically, it seems that al-Qa'ida may have taken its own plans "off the shelf" in anticipation of the impending U.S. attack.

David Michael Smith
College of the Mainland
Texas City, Texas

Leo Panitch, RENEWING SOCIALISM: DEMOCRACY, STRATEGY, AND IMAGINATION (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001)

As we begin the new millennium we are haunted by the specters of neo-liberal reform, the political ascendancy of the New Right, and the dramatic advance of global capitalism. In the wake of this advance many of the gains made by the Left in the past century have been swept away and forgotten. Moreover, new currents of complacency and conformity are being generated by the pervasive rhetoric of this "New World Order." In various ways, we are reminded again and again of the triumph of capital. We are constantly told that there is no other alternative. For some, this new political and economic climate has made any serious discussion of socialist renewal a pointless and empty prospect. But for others, the revolutionary spirit has not died. As the title of his latest book suggests, Leo Panitch holds out hope for a new socialism, a new democracy, a new strategy, and most importantly, a new imagination. But first, we must transcend the pessimism that permeates our society.

Panitch calls for the renewal of socialist politics and the development of a socialist imagination. Stylistically, he captures what is best in Gramsci and Marx. His selection of quotes from these authors makes the work very appealing, as does his use of epigrams (from such figures as Raymond Williams, Lewis Carroll, Bertolt Brecht, and Leonard Cohen). Methodologically, Panitch incorporates a variety of approaches. He uses a historical approach to analyze the demise of communism. He also takes stock of existing democratic structures in an effort to discern what is salvageable and conducive to the development of freedom. He questions some of the false dichotomies that keep the Left divided and ineffective. He critiques some of the current strategies of the Left in the face of globalization. Most importantly, however, he always returns his key focus on the cultivation of capacities and imagination.

I found particularly intriguing the chapters on reform and revolution, on the demise of communism, on globalization, and on "Transcending Pessimism" (chaps. 1, 2, 5, and 7). The first chapter begins with a brief analysis of the ascendancy of the New Right, during the Reagan-Thatcher years. Panitch views this ascendancy as a kind of reaffirmation or reassertion of the bourgeois revolution. He re-evaluates the current rhetoric of "revolution" and "reform" that has arisen in its wake. He recognizes how these terms have been co-opted into the discourse of the New Right, to reinforce and legitimize a "bourgeois revolution from above." Panitch stresses that it would be a mistake "to dismiss such rhetoric as mendacious nonsense." Such dismissal "misses an important dimension of what [the terms] have been about" (14). In part, the "revolution" has been about undermining socialist aspirations and marginalizing the very possibility of socialist renewal. This has led to a "deep pessimism" on the Left in recent years (20). Advocacy of socialism is relegated to the periphery of the Left's political debates. Panitch fears that the pressure to "get real" has reduced the Left to engaging in "a moderate pragmatism" that is careful "not to offend the sensibilities of those seduced by the appeal of the bourgeois revolution from above" (21f).

What is needed for socialist renewal, Panitch argues, is "the penetration of socialist ideas and creative organizational and intellectual capacities throughout society" Drawing on Gramsci, Pantich advocates the development of a socialist counter-hegemony. Socialist ideals must permeate "the broadest possible range of institutions in society": not merely parties, unions, and movements "but also in factories, offices, schools, universities, churches, community centers, and even in that contemporary center of working class life¾the shopping mall" (43). To some this may seem utopian, but this is precisely the point. According to Panitch "it is first of all necessary to dream" (12). We may never realize a better world if our complacency, conformity and "moderate pragmatism" render us incapable of even imagining one.

In the second chapter, Panitch seeks to understand the demise of some previous institutional forms of socialism. He counters many of the right-wing views of this process, such as the "end of history" argument. The fate of communism does not indicate that socialism is inherently unworkable, nor does it suggest that capitalism is the only workable system. One factor in communism's collapse was the outside pressure of capital. This pressure typically led to a coercive and oppressive military and police apparatus. Another factor is the particular experience or lack of experience that these regimes had with democracy. Panitch maintains that the specific types of organization that were necessary for revolution in these states were not necessarily conducive to democracy once the revolution was complete. There is more to the analysis, but what is most important is Panitch's emphasis on learning from past examples and pitfalls as we try to work toward a new socialism.

The chapter on globalization is one of the most stylistically appealing in the book. Panitch frames this chapter with epigrams from Through the Looking Glass. Alice is running through the garden hand in hand with the Red Queen, trying desperately to keep up. Yet in spite of her efforts, all Alice can do is stay in the same place. The Red Queen then explains, "if you want to get somewhere else," you must "run at least twice as fast as that!" Panitch uses this image to represent the current stage of global capitalism:

Think of the Red Queen's garden as capitalism. The bourgeoisie's relentless search for markets and profits bring about faster and faster changes in production and space, industry and commerce, occupation and locale, with profound effects on the organization of classes and states. It is through this ferocious process of extension and change that capitalism is preserved and reproduced. Now think of Alice, frantically running alongside the Red Queen, as the labor movement, or the social movements, or the broadly defined "Left." For all the running they did in the twentieth century, for all the mobilization and reform, even the moments of revolution and national liberation, the world today is most certainly still very much capitalist, indeed it would seem ever more so. (139)

Beyond its stylistic appeal, this chapter reviews and critiques some of the Left's current positions on globalization, such as the view of globalization as a fundamentally new phase of capitalism, in which capital has transcended the nation-state. Panitch explains that this position may be misleading in two ways. One way is through "an overestimation of the extent to which nation-states were capable of controlling capital in an earlier era[,]. as if the Left's mode of practice was adequate in relation to the nation-state." (142). The danger here is that this position may lead to a similar approach at the global level. According to Panitch such a strategy amounts to simply running faster to keep pace with the Red Queen. But ultimately, as with Alice, it gets us nowhere. A second way the position is misleading is that it might lead us to overlook "the extent to which today's globalization is both authored by the state and is primarily about reorganizing the state" (142f). By ignoring this aspect, we promote a false dichotomy between national and international struggles. As examples, Panitch discusses GATT and WTO. Certainly these organizations are operating at a supra-national level, but the role of the nation-state should not be ignored. Thus, the Canadian and Mexican States continue to represent the interests of their own bourgeoisies. The false dichotomy "diverts attention from the Left's need to develop its own strategies for transforming the state, even as a means of developing an appropriate international strategy" (143).

In the final chapter, "Transcending Pessimism," Panitch again incorporates some nice imagery, drawing on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, whose leading character "famously symbolizes the tragic dimension of the relentless competitiveness at the heart of the American capitalist dream" (197). Panitch explains that what makes this tale universally tragic is that "even people who wonder whether the capitalist dream isn't the wrong dream see no way of realizing a life beyond capitalism" (198). In effect, the ideals of revolution and reform have been co-opted and are now part of the New Right's "revolutionary" discourse. Within this discourse, the failures of past socialist projects are held up as evidence of capital's triumph. This discourse marginalizes advocates of socialist renewal, who are pressured to adopt a "moderate pragmatism" Anyone who wants qualitative social change must confront these issues and transcend the pessimism they generate. But how do we do this?

Returning to the theme of imagination and capacities, Panitch engages the work of Ernst Bloch, for whom the "utopian intention" is the real "motor force of history." This motor force "may be found in architecture, painting, literature, music, ethics, and religion" (198). Panitch is critical of the various dismissals of utopian socialism and utopian thought. The capacity for this type of thought is useful to us even if the actual projects lack so much as "a shred of possibility." Without the capacity to imagine a world different from the one we now have, "people couldn't run a society even if power was handed over by the ruling classes" (222).

Panitch challenges all of us to imagine a classless society where freedom and equality might be realized. He presents the problem, develops its parameters, and, in the final chapter, drives his argument home. The development of socialism has always been rooted in the development of productive forces¾what Panitch calls "capacities." Today the productive forces that need to be developed include above all "the collective capacity to govern democratically everyday life, the economy, civil society, and the state" (222). Socialist renewal requires us to cultivate and accumulate our collective liberating capacities. In the process, we can once again "discover the spirit of revolution" and "build a new house where freedom can dwell" (226).

Joseph E. Ethier
Ph.D. student, Department of Sociology
Northeastern University

The Global Question in an Urban World

David Harvey, SPACES OF HOPE (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)

It is hard to overstate the influence of David Harvey in critical social studies in the last three decades, extending from his home discipline of Geography as far out as Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Alongside figures like Manuel Castells and Henri Lefbvre, Harvey is one of the principal influences on a generation of critical scholarship of space, place, and the city. He is as well known for some of his innovative conceptual work as he is for what he helped reintroduce to social studies: his emphasis on space, his attention to the urban, and his deployment of Marxist tools in his "reading of the city like a text." In Spaces of Hope, Harvey looks back over his career and into the future, mapping out utopian possibilities in an urban and global world, which, as he reminds us, was already foreshadowed in Capital.

The first part of the book treads over old ground, as Harvey returns to some of the theoretical foundations underlying his work. He recasts both the Communist Manifesto and Capital as grounds for a relational and materialist geography, jettisoning some of the more dated assumptions in those works (such as the Eurocentric reference to "barbaric" nations) in favor of some of the more provocative propositions for studies of a globalized capitalism today. He points, for example, to several ways in which some of the features of global capitalism were already prefigured in those works, including the centrality of the "spatial fix" to the contradictions of capital, and the creation of an uneven global organization of space for production.

In subsequent sections of the book Harvey deploys these tools in an analysis of the possibilities of resistance to global capitalism. In one of the more interesting passages, he proposes a "return to the body" in a way that links "postmodern" studies of the body with globalization studies. Both approaches have proceeded apace in recent years without significant overlap. While scholars familiar with the literature from which Harvey assembles this theoretical bricolage may find fault with his at times cursory invocation of those approaches, it is hard to deny the importance of the linkage. A theoretical synthesis, one that recasts the body as site of constestation and experience in global capitalism, holds significant political and intellectual promise. After all, it is the body that works, consumes, suffers, and resists capitalism. For example, a possibility implicit in this formulation (not explored by Harvey) would be the study of the circulation of bodies in global cities, and the way in which this sets the ground for struggle over dis-placed bodies (such as those of "unwelcome immigrants") at certain times.

In the later sections, Harvey also discusses the possibilities of utopian moments and spaces¾spaces of hope¾in global capitalism. He provides a philosophical justification for a dialectical utopianism, one grounded not only in temporal possibilities (such as that of a utopian future) but in spatial ones as well. He calls for renewed attention to "species being" as well as for a new ethic toward nature, and uses the image of the "insurgent architect" as a call to this long revolution of transforming practices and imaginations, constantly bridging movements and platforms toward the unknown utopian destination.

The latter portions of the book are very different from many of Harvey's other writings, and perhaps for this reason they leave the reader wanting something more concrete. All calls to utopia are necessarily speculative, and other Marxist and Marxist-friendly scholars who have called in recent years for a return to utopian thinking (Immanuel Wallerstein, Erik O. Wright, Roberto Unger, among others) have done so with equal flair. Harvey, however, shies away from making too many concrete connections to some of the earlier portions of the book and avoids giving political recipes, insisting that utopian futures are unknown and indeterminate. But this strategy leaves the reader with open questions. Some have to do with the connections between dialectical utopianism and earlier analyses: for example, how do spatial fixes of capitalism constrain the possibilities for the proposed new uses of space? Does the globalization of capital in any way facilitate the globalization of resistance? And other questions remain about real-world models that may or may not qualify as "spaces of hope." Harvey mentions the examples of Porto Alegre and Kerala approvingly, though in passing. In the case of Porto Alegre, he cites the importance of mediating institutions that bridge the gap between universalist and particularist agendas. This is an interesting insight, but does not allow purchase on the question of other instances where such agendas meet, or whether there are moments in which "particularist" agendas might be liberatory as well.

The openness of these questions, however, may be intentional on the author's part. Perhaps we are indeed at a crucial juncture in history, and it is the experienced critics of capitalism and its institutions, such as David Harvey, who are best poised to point to the hopeful potentials implicit in today's world. The history we make out of these potentials, as Harvey reminds us, is up to us.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Department of Sociology
University of Pittsburgh

Liberatory Urbanism vs. Control of Public Space

Jeff Ferrell, TEARING DOWN THE STREETS: ADVENTURES IN URBAN ANARCHY (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

The final weeks of Rudy Giuliani's term as mayor of New York City revealed as much about urban life under Giuliani-ism as any month in the previous eight years. In early December 2001, the City began arresting homeless people for sleeping on the steps of the Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street. Vice-President Dick Cheney and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon slept in hotels nearby as the police beat those sleeping outside and sent them to New York's de facto shelter system: jail. The Church sued the City on behalf of the homeless, but was rebuffed, stifled by the new regulatory infrastructure (Goodman,1998) taking hold of the public spaces of American cities.

The Charas/El Bohio community services center in the East Village lost its request for a stay of eviction on December 18. In response, its supporters began a 24-hour vigil. Charas had been sold, without competitive bidding, to a Giuliani campaign contributor back in 1998. By 2001, the Village Voice, in its "Best of New York" issue, dubbed Charas/El Bohio "the Best Place to Rally Around and/or Resuscitate." Noting that rehearsal space at Charas cost from $11 to $14 an hour, the Voice explained, "Charas serves the Lower East Side community, not the Big Apple Tour Bus, and that is why, partially, it is in jeopardy" (Sottile, 2001). Charas and Lower East Side Activism had a long history. Civil disobedience training for countless community struggles had been held at Charas; that made it a target. "Man of the year, get out of here!" protesters, squatters, garden activists, and requisite East Village vagabonds screamed (referring to the mayor's recent award as Time's Person of the Year), as they watched the NYPD shut down access to this space where much of the do-it-yourself spirit of their organizing and neighborhood had thrived. Both Charas and the steps of 5th Avenue Presbyterian had served as meeting spaces for marginalized groups. While the Mayor had for years battled communities of difference who fought his agenda of privatizing New York's public spaces, September 11 neutralized much of the official opposition to his plan to evict the neighborhood community center where the enemies of neoliberalism converged.

The problem, as Jeff Ferrell contends, is that even before 9/11, Guiliani-ism, as a mode of urban governance favoring suburban blandification of public space¾replete with elaborate security functions, racial profiling, and "stop and frisk" policing¾had become a model many cities hoped to emulate. This model is a subtext to Ferrell's discussion. His point is that as American cities slowly become homogenized and administratively segregated, an anarchist opposition to the process becomes more pronounced. If Disneyfication-the use of entertainment as ideology-is the future of the American physical and psychological landscape, Ferrell suggests that the spirit of anarchism offers the best possibility of a detour off the one-way suburban superhighway toward the mallification of the American imagination.

To make his point, Ferrell places himself within the narrative from the get-go: "I live as much of my life as possible on the streets, wrapped in the everyday rhythms of the city's public spaces." The streets, he finds, have changed in front of his eyes. Through his field work, listening to music, talking with those who inhabit the public spaces-the punks, hobos, base jumpers, cyclists-a sense emerges that something has gone vastly wrong: the feel of urban life altered, spontaneous flow restricted. "Something's happening here in the streets of America and beyond, and while what it is may not be exactly clear, it is clear that it involves contested practices of public life and community."

What unfolds is a debate about social justice, the meanings of social decay, inequality, racial profiling, economic development, redevelopment, and public space, taking place in the streets of countless American cities. The question is to what degree urban redevelopment has reduced¾or reproduced¾systems of spatial inequality during one the longest periods of economic expansion in US history.

Building on newspaper stories, field notes, historic and sociological texts, Ferrell traces the growth of an elaborate series of legal mechanisms designed to regulate public spaces within the urban sphere. His reading closely concurs with Michael Hardt's (2000) contention that western cultures have moved beyond a disciplinary era toward an era of social control. Yet his point is far more grounded in details of the transformation and control of physical spaces. Ferrell outlines the almost methodical steps used to target "communities of difference" as urban centers have been redesigned, excluding groups on the basis of race, class, gender, and political opposition to the new suburban vision of urban life. Tools utilized include anti-vagrancy, zoning, nuisance-abatement, and quality of life statutes, all organized together to cordon off public spaces utilized by prostitutes, the homeless, gang members, American Indians, green gardeners, anarchists, and countless other groups that deviate from normative notions of citizenship and political participation. The assumption is that city spaces should function like for-profit entertainment parks. In order for these entertainment zones to thrive the state must regulate their use. Ferrell explains,

The caretakers of these newly segregated spaces-politicians, business leaders, community associations-contend that such closed spaces are essential to the economic vitality, interpersonal safety, and emerging identity of the city. And because of this, they readily bring down the full weight of the law and commerce on those who, by choice or chance, trespass on them.

At its core, the new regulation of public spaces has to do with questions about difference. There is the old adage, we're comfortable talking about diversity until we meet someone truly different. "Liberty unrestrained is an invitation to anarchy.," Ferrell quotes a California Supreme Court Justice explaining as justification for one of the legal civil injunctions. Part of why people are so adamantly opposed to these new injunctions is that they attack presumably protected freedoms with the flimsiest of legal arguments. One would assume, as a US citizen, that those who look, think, walk or appear different would be allowed a place in the public sphere. Many of these new regulatory functions¾such as Chicago's political/racial profiling ordinance aimed at restricting the activities of gang members¾never withstand court fights over their constitutionality. This is little consolation, however, to the thousands arrested and put through the system for "loitering in any public place . with no apparent purpose." The message remains that to use public space is to take a chance. Those arrested never get back the time they spent in the system. Others, such as New York's XXX Zoning Law, which meandered its way through the legal system for over three years, was one of only two or three out of some thirty First Amendment cases the ACLU lost to the Giuliani administration. They are created to severely curtail First Amendment protected speech. Members of the anarchist collective Food Not Bombs were arrested, after all, for giving away food without a permit, to the homeless.

At its core, the new "class cleansing" of public spaces aims to attack and marginalize unpopular ideas and those who harbor them. Long before September 11, the powers that be sought to delegitimize activists, anarchists, and the like as terrorists. On May 10, 2001, FBI director Louis Freeh testified at a Senate committee hearing: "Anarchists and extreme socialist groups-such as. Reclaim the Streets.¾have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States." Ferrell unpacks the ways labeling is used to delegitimize those opposing the new spatial order¾a process which became a great deal easier after 9/11. In December 2001, after all, the Attorney General claimed that those who opposed his approach to challenging terrorism "only aid terrorists." It was part of a classic panic script used to justify encroachments into the public sphere, based on a careful schema for organizing and evaluating information. It assumes that "sex monsters," terrorists, or some other deviant group pose such a terrible threat that we must give up our most basic rights in order to stop them. Anyone who rejects this assumption and questions the validity of the charges is a Witch, Terrorist, Pedophile, Communist, or "sexual monster" himself (Jenkens, 1998). Ferrell assesses a great many of these ideologies of control.

Tearing Down the Streets is also the story of the emergence of public space groups, such as Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass. In outlining their group histories, Ferrell counters: "This is the story of resistance to emerging spatial controls-the history of those who have long fought the regulation and closure of public space; who've time and again countered new forms of spatial exclusion with the inclusive politics of liberty, diversity, disorder, who've been able to create communities of difference and inclusion."

With the enthusiasm of an angst-ridden 13-year-old with his first guitar, Ferrell traces a genealogy of the anarchist movements opposing the attack on public spaces, covering much of the trajectory identified by Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. From the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Wobblies, Ferrell reaches into a history with stars such as Emma Goldman and the Sex Pistols. Resonating as much as ever, Goldman explains that anarchism "stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral." From the Wobbly contention "Direct Action Gets the Goods" to Bakunin's insight, "The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too," to 1970's punk rock, the history of anarchism mirrors a modern-day history of cultural resistance.

My one complaint about the book is that there are times when the writing falls prey to the tiresome, white male, boomer-academic idealization of anarchists, Kerouac, and the macho aspects of all things alternative. One gets the feeling that Ferrell has not taken to heart the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" or "Anarchy for Sale," or attended one of the not so "democratic" Spokes Council meetings before one of the convergence actions of the global justice movement, which often replace one system of hierarchies with another. Like any good idea, anarchy can be taken too far. All too often, men (myself included) utilize anarchist organizing's tolerance for aggression as a way to mask male privilege or to justify silencing those who speak with fewer decibels.

But none of this is to diminish the recent contributions the idea of anarchism has made to notions of direct democracy, community organizing, or cultural resistance. When every other "liberal" interest group, the unions, and countless other NGOs bowed out of participating in the protests against the World Economic Forum last February, anarchists risked arrest and organized a disciplined peaceful protest attended by well over 10,000. (And all this organizing took place within weeks of being evicted from our usual convergence center at Charas.) Recall, in the wake of 9/11 New Yorkers had been told that the new patriotism involved going shopping. It was anarchists who challenged this transparent attempt to wrap a political agenda around a crisis. And when faced with a police force which betrayed every guarantee it had made in negotiations with lawyers, anarchists maintained a joyous opposition, replete with a samba band reclaiming beats and urban possibilities. My most joyous moment of the WEF protests was when, squeezed in by a phalanx of police, the crowd began to sing, "We all live in a Military State, a Military State, a Military State," to the tune of the Beatles anthem Yellow Submarine.

The subtext for much of the recent anarchist vogue is a link between an aesthetic appreciation for punk rock, which produced some of the most passionate music of the last quarter-century, and a rich political tradition dating back well into the 19th century. We were not taught this connection in school, but anarchism is an idea with deep roots in both the American suburbs and radical circles. Their intersections produce sympathies for both global justice activism and libertarianism. The problem is that like countless other forms of dissent, it is all too often commodified and misappropriated.

To the extent that the new regulatory infrastructure is aimed at squeezing certain groups out of public space, it involves core questions about pluralistic democracy. Through Tearing Down the Streets, Ferrell gives meaning to what for many of us were isolated city ordinances. He writes, "programs designed to police cultural spaces, to restore civility and community in such spaces, in fact reinforce patterns of special inequality, day-to-day economic and ethnic apartheid, and street-level abuse." The result is a series of questions about who has access to which conversations, who can or cannot walk in which areas, who can drive without being profiled by police, all hearkening back to an era when it was socially acceptable to profile people by race rather than by today's class-based profiling aimed at urban vagrants. ".[W]ithout public spaces, any kind of talk about democracy basically goes out the window," one of Ferrell's interviewees contends. And the point is clear: if you can't walk in the street, how can you be considered a citizen? (see Ribey, 1998) Building on a dynamic cultural tradition, Ferrell arms us with a rich list of citations, case studies, and vivid new terms for a class war between "corporate control of public space" and a burgeoning do-it-yourself global justice movement aimed at unleashing a new "liberatory urbanism" for a new century.

Goodman, Andrew. 1998. "A Shrinkage of Public Space: Notes on the New Regulatory Infrastructure," Studies in Political Economy 57 (autumn): 149-162.

Hardt, Michael. 2000. "The Withering of Civil Society," in Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere. Edited by Mike Hill and Warren. Montag. London: Verso Press, 2000.

Jenkens, Philip. 1998. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ribey, Francis. 1998. "Pas de pieton pas de citoyen: marcher en ville un manifeste de citoyenneté" [If No Pedestrians, then No Citizens: City Walking, a Manifestation of Citizenship] Revue des Sciences Sociales de la France de l'Est 25: 35-41.

Scottie, Alexis. 2001. "Best Place to Rally Around and/or Resuscitate -Charas/El Bohio." Village Voice.

Benjamin Shepard
benshepard@mindspring.com

Jamie Peck, WORKFARE STATES (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).

Jamie Peck's thesis is that the campaign to transform the rights-based benefit programs of the industrial-era welfare state into a post-industrial-era "workfare state" is an international movement or a "transnational regulatory project." According to Peck workfare policies are "concerned with deterring welfare claims and necessitating the acceptance of low-paid, unstable jobs in the context of increasingly 'flexible' labor markets" (6). Peck acknowledges that the United States is the "undisputed pioneer" in workfare and that there are differences among countries, but he nonetheless maintains that the bastion of neo-liberalism is not alone.

Peck does an admirable job of exploring a range of workfare projects and policies, theoretically and empirically, in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including newspaper accounts, reports by various levels of government, research, speeches, personal interviews of program staff, social activists, and trade unionists, and, of course, other studies of the subject, Peck has provided a valuable resource to anyone concerned with the current course of the welfare state. Among the many telling commentaries that he passes on is this gem: the Wall Street Journal's characterization of the British tax credit for working families as the "workfare subsidy" (324). Peck's conclusion that "it is time to reform work as well as welfare" (366) is one that I share (Goldberg & Collins, 2001), although I wish he had provided a model for such reform or discussed its feasibility. "Ultimately," Peck writes, "workfare is a political choice, not an economic necessity" (80). This is an important distinction, although here, too, I would have liked him to prove the primacy of politics or directly refute the economic exigency rationale.

Several other important questions can be raised about Peck's interesting study and provocative conclusions. One pertains to the use of the term "workfare states"; another is the extent to which the current system of labor regulation is a significant change from the former one; and still another, is whether Peck is justified in suggesting that workfare is an international movement.

Peck uses the term workfare broadly to apply to work requirements and time limits for welfare recipients. Traditionally, however, workfare applies to working for one's welfare benefits or working them off. This is in contrast to public job creation programs, like those mounted in the United States during the Great Depression and in the 1970s through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration (CETA). These programs employed jobless workers in projects separate from relief administration and paid them a wage larger than a welfare benefit (a "security" wage in the case of the New Deal job programs). These have been characterized as "fair work" instead of workfare (Rose, 1995; Goldberg et al., 1995).

Neither workfare, traditionally defined, nor job creation programs are common in what Peck calls "workfare states." Rather, as he is at pains to point out, relief officials increasingly and typically take the cheaper route of simply making relief time-limited and contingent on taking an existing job, indeed, any job. Instead of providing employment, education, training or a combination of these, relief officials more commonly push the poor into the labor market as fast as possible. Peck makes the point that conservatives find themselves in a bind, bent on work requirements and reduction of the rolls but unwilling to pay the price of training or job creation. Hence the emphasis on the "work-first" approach¾named for the Riverside, California program that developed this model. Riverside "aggressively 'jobclubbed' recipients into private sector jobs" (189f). "This has the effect, within local labor markets of driving down both the reservation wage of the unemployed and the prevailing market wage for low-paid workers, while also further destabilizing contingent employment" (ibid.). Peck, however, does not cite evidence of these hypothesized effects.

Peck emphasizes that this model of pushing the poor into the labor market with little else but cheerleading and benefit restriction "works" only so long as there are available jobs. (It probably goes without saying that Peck clearly recognizes that the welfare reformers' criterion for what "works" or for "success" is reduction of the welfare rolls, not reduction of poverty.) Following Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who wrote the foreword to Workfare States, Peck points out that restrictive welfare policies are likely to be undertaken when unemployment is low or falling. However, efforts to restrict welfare in the United States were accelerating when unemployment reached the double-digit mark in the 1980s and during the recession of the early 1990s. In 1996, when Aid to Families with Dependent Children was repealed and replaced by a program significantly named Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, recovery was underway, but unemployment was still above 5 percent (5.4%). In any case, it would have been interesting to know what Peck anticipates when unemployment rises.

How different is the "workfare state" from the "rights-based welfare state?" Peck himself cautions against exaggerating the rights granted by the industrial-era welfare state in the United States. In this respect it seems important to point out that in the United States protection from being forced to accept undesirable jobs at inadequate wages (or no job at all) applied largely to destitute single mothers-and even then, with exceptions. (Some workers experiencing short-term unemployment have been covered since the Great Depression.) Throughout its 60-year history Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) largely confined benefits to single mothers and their families. Two-parent families with an unemployed parent were always less than 10 percent of recipient families. This left single adults of both sexes and most men in two-parent families without federally aided public assistance. Their recourse was to state general assistance programs that were meager and often available only on an emergency basis. Furthermore, given the very low level of public assistance benefits (all below the federal poverty level, even when the cash value of food stamps was included) and, at least until the 1960s, denial of benefits based on moral criteria or seasonal need for their labor in the fields, many poor, single mothers of dependent children were obliged to work, on or off the books, in order to survive (Bell, 1965; Piven & Cloward, 1993; Edin & Lein, 1997; Spalter-Roth et al., 1995). Indeed, one might say that in 1996, with the repeal of AFDC, many low-wage workers lost their welfare supplements.

The change in the United States is that women as well as men have been commodified. In the nineteenth century, men were commodified, that is, denied all but what their labor would sell for in the market. In England, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the Poor Law reform of 1834 denied able-bodied men relief outside the poorhouse. In the post-Civil War period, when the United States was rapidly industrializing, one major U.S. city after another followed the English lead by abolishing outdoor relief or public assistance to the poor in their own homes (Mohl, 1983). Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, mothers' aid programs were established in most states. Although a break with prohibition of public outdoor relief, mothers' aid programs were meager, not available in all jurisdictions of the states, and largely confined to respectable white widows. The mothers' aid programs were expanded with federal financial assistance in Title IV of the Social Security Act of 1935, Aid to Dependent Children (later AFDC). The exception was during the early New Deal, a time of mass unemployment and political unrest, when federal relief was non-categorical, that is, based on need alone rather than such criteria as employability, family composition, or age as well. A substantial proportion of the unemployed (although never the majority) had access to a work benefit through federal work programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), but these were terminated during World War II and only resumed for a brief period in the 1970s when unemployment reached what was then a post-war zenith.

Drawing on a model of Claus Offe, Peck identifies modes of labor-market regulation that include both negative sanctions (penalties) and positive sanctions (incentives). Yet, in his extensive treatment of labor market regulation, Peck confines himself almost entirely to penalties and barely mentions incentives. In its effort to move more women into the low-wage labor market, Washington has used both the restriction of public assistance (work requirements and time limits) and a wage subsidy or incentive, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which, by the mid-1990s, was costing the federal treasury more than either AFDC or its successor. For workers supporting two children or more and earning year-round wages in the range of the poverty level, income can be increased by about 40 percent. Significantly, the EITC's advocates, when it was established in 1975, included southern legislators who had opposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), the federal public assistance program proposed by President Nixon that would have guaranteed all families with children a minimum level of assistance. Why? Because it would threaten low-wage labor: "Who will push the wheelbarrows and iron the shirts?" One can argue that the EITC is a subsidy to sweatshops and that it could reduce pressure to raise wages, to name only two reservations. Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked in a study of labor market regulation.

What about the claim to an international movement? In our study of nine wealthy countries, my colleagues and I found that although there is still considerable difference between welfare leaders like Sweden and France and welfare resisters like the United States and Japan, income support has become more restrictive and more closely tied to work at the very time when jobs have become less available or less desirable (Goldberg & Rosenthal, 2002). Restrictions on relief like those detailed by Peck are observable in countries with greater social protection than the three that he studied. For example, Gerhard Bäcker and Ute Klammer (2002) conclude that in Germany ".social protection is being diminished so that workers will be obliged to accept whatever job is available." Peck bases his conclusion that the workfare trend is international on the study of three countries that have been classified as "liberal welfare states" (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999) and that are less generous in their social provision than most Western and Northern European countries. The United States and Britain have been founts of neo-liberalism, and Canada, though offsetting the effects of chronically high unemployment for a number of years, began cutting back and restructuring its welfare state in the early 1990s, notably dismantling its non-categorical Canada Assistance Plan (CAP). Peck may well be prescient in identifying an international movement, but it seems premature to draw such a conclusion in view of the size and nature of his sample.

References

Bäcker, G., & U. Klammer (2002). "The Dismantling of Welfare in Germany," in Goldberg & Rosenthal.

Winifred Bell, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

Edin, K., & L. Lein (1997). Making Ends Meet: How Welfare Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Goldberg, G. S., & M.G. Rosenthal, eds. (2002). Diminishing Welfare: A Cross-National Study of Social Provision. Westport, CT: Auburn House.

Goldberg, G. S., & S. D. Collins (2001). Washington's New Poor Law: Welfare "Reform" and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present. New York: Apex Press.

Goldberg, G. S., S. D. Collins, H. L. Ginsburg & P. Harvey. (1995). "Welfare 'Reform': Where Are the Jobs?" Uncommon Sense 5 (New York: National Jobs for All Coalition, May).

Mohl, R. A. (1983). "The Abolition of Public Outdoor Relief, 1870-1900," in W. I. Trattner, ed. Social Welfare or Social Control: Some Historical Reflections on Regulating the Poor. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

Piven, F. F., & R. Cloward (1993). Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, updated ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Rose, N. (1995). Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Roberta Spalter-Roth, R., B. Burr, H. Hartmann & L. Shaw. (1995). Welfare That Works: The Working Lives of AFDC Recipients. Washington, DC: Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg
Adelphi University School of Social Work;
Chair, National Jobs for All Coalition

Patrick Colm Hogan, THE CULTURE OF CONFORMISM: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CONSENT (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

Conformity to the social order has proven perplexing to the most acute commentators on the human condition. Perhaps the greatest essayist of early modern Europe, Montaigne, described the arrival in France of three alleged Brazilian cannibals. In 1562, these "guests" had witnessed a procession in the environs of Rouen featuring the pre-pubescent King Charles IX (1550-1574). When asked for their opinions, the newcomers expressed astonishment that

so many tall men wearing beards, strong, and well armed.. should submit to obey a child... Secondly... that there were among us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean, and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.

Four centuries later, another aristocratic man of letters, Barrington Moore Jr., wrote Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978), which he called "a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation."

In the years since Moore wrote, economic injustices and inequalities have grown spectacularly. The median income of the wealthiest 10% of nations has escalated from 77 times the poorest 10% in 1980 to 122 times by 1999. At home, even Business Week (22 April 2002) concedes: "In 1980, CEO compensation was 42 times that of the average worker. In 2000, it was 531 times." Between 1990 and 2000, a decade said to be of unprecedented prosperity, executive pay catapulted 571%, while the average worker saw a 37% hike essentially wiped out by inflation of 32%. Thus, for those dwelling in the bottom 80% of the economic birdcage, the Clinton-era prosperity delivered precious little.

Appearing ready to take up Barrington Moore's challenge, Patrick Colm Hogan asks in his introduction "why do people not rebel?" Suddenly, though, he retreats from this question. Calling the current historical conjuncture "a phase of hyperconformism," he proclaims that his book is emphatically "not a study of why people resist or rebel." He clarifies:

In short, this is a study of the modes of action and thought that constitute social consent, modes of action and thought that may be particularly pervasive now, but are continuous with what went before; it is not a history of variations in the flourishing and waning of consent.

In other words, he is fascinated by the first half of Moore's mission ("why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies"); but for the purposes of this intellectual enterprise, he will largely ignore the second half ("why at other times [people] become very angry and try with forcefulness and passion to do something about their situation").

Gramsci explained that ruling classes rule through the iron fist of coercion and the velvet glove of persuasion. Hogan's mission is to understand the deeper psychological and cultural fabrics that help pad the velvet glove. While admitting that "threats of violence" are "centrally important in democratic societies," he adds: "not all self-interests relevant to consent are coercive. Many concern positive goals such as acquisition or advantage." Hogan is graphically aware of the skull-cracking devastation that can be wrought by the state's coercive apparatus (he cites an Amnesty International report for New York City indicating over 2,000 charges of police brutality in 1994, as well as a death in police custody almost every other week). But to see coercive force as the glue holding together the social system would for Hogan represent a rather shallow explanation of why so many people eagerly offer their consent. For him, "systems that rely too heavily on coercive force are inefficient. They are wasteful of resources, breed popular discontent, and are frequently unstable for that reason."

Hogan's approach has several virtues. He is effective at showing how legal and linguistic constructions help to obscure the social order's blatant crimes and injustices. Thus, in the first twenty-five years of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, as he reports, approximately 250,000 workers perished on the job, but only four people were imprisoned for OSHA violations. "Homicide" is not a word that comes to mind when a worker is buried alive in a trench as the result of a construction firm's costcutting. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system and local television news focus heavily on the $4 billion per annum of robberies carried out by poorer malefactors, rather than the estimated $200 billion per annum of larceny perpetrated by white-collar operatives the "crime in the suites" which so often graces the pages of Business Week and the Wall Street Journal.

A second area in which consent seems manufactured: media and political leaders offer a rather constrained and sometimes false range of choices. Thus, George W. Bush tells the world that you are either "with us" or "with the terrorists." And in February 1991, when the Gallup poll asked Americans, "Do you think U.S. and allied forces should begin a ground attack soon to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait¾or should we hold off for now and continue to rely on air power to do the job?," the question essentially ruled out any peaceful alternatives, including ceasefire or negotiations.

Finally, Hogan provides a remarkably lucid introduction to many of the social science concepts used to explain submission: micro-hierarchization, cognitive exempla, transference, and lexical structures. While this book could have easily degenerated into a jargon-ridden hash, Hogan is good at providing clear explanations of the various conceptual and psychological mechanisms that secure conformity.

Some of Hogan's constructs may merit challenge as being perhaps too neat and tidy. For all of the powerful insights he draws from Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), Hogan argues that imperialism regarded "Africans as children" and Asians, particularly Indian society, as elderly, "senile and decrepit." He probably underestimates how much child metaphors also dominated discourse on Asians. The historian V.G. Kiernan has explored stereotypes of Asian infantility. For instance, J.F. Davis, representing British interests in China, declared in 1840 that "the Chinese have much of that childish character which distinguishes other Asiatics." The British diplomat Lord Hardinge in Old Diplomacy (1947) observed that the Persians, although gifted, are "just like children." European visitors to India's Mogul Empire of the sixteenth century had expressed mirth at the fascination of these Muslim rulers with whistles, mirrors, and various toys.1 In other words, the view of Asians as part of a senescent civilizational nursing home does not always hold up in ruling-class idiom.

I also have some skepticism about Hogan's claim that right-wing discourse is fixated on animality (i.e., Africans and nineteenth- century Irish are simians, ape-like threats to civilization), while liberalism prefers the domain of maturity ("Adulthood. is the standard by which the others are measured, and it is the model for the dominant group"). Cold war liberalism certainly invoked animal metaphors for condemning the supposedly insatiable appetites of expansionist communism, while many conservatives use the domain of maturity to deny legitimacy to the views of opponents who are judged irresponsibly utopian. The proto-fascist novelist Wyndham Lewis showed that the domain of maturity could be an ideological weapon against mass democracy when in The Art of Being Ruled he could not contain his loathing of the general public: "'the Infants' Class always absorbs 80 percent of the personnel. which we call mankind." Others, like the liberal theologian/ political reactionary William Inge, found animal metaphors more appropriate for the shortcomings of democracy: "The democratic man is a species of ape. The art of success in a democracy is to know how to play upon the ape in humanity" (in Beaverbrook's Evening Standard, 6 June 1928).2 In short, images of animality and immaturity are not so easily pegged on the political spectrum as Hogan seems to aver.

Many of Hogan's examples are drawn from academe, where as a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut he has personal experience. Several times he makes vague reference to vile forms of discrimination against women and people of color by the dominant white male professoriate. It would have been useful if he had provided more specific cases and detail. He discusses how "Racism can clearly produce deep traumas, when, for example, white faculty in a university setting continually harass and demean a nonwhite colleague, insulting him or her at every opportunity, derogating his or her work, accusing him or her of criminal behavior without evidence of any kind." Earlier he speaks of "forms of intimidating harassment": "This sort of thing is found all the time in the treatment of women and nonwhites in academia, as when nonwhites' publication records are subjected to a thorough criticism, with every possible flaw investigated, while whites' publication records are hardly given a second thought."

Judging by the tenor of Hogan's remarks, he appears to be in accord with Phyllis Chesler's remark in Letters to a Young Feminist that "It may be 1998 but, in my mind, we are still living in the 1950s." Racism and sexism are far from expired in the academy, but Hogan has relatively little to say about an alternative scenario: how the successful incorporation of thousands of tenured women and people of color could be buttressing many university systems against renewed radical upheaval and challenge. There is a rainbow coalition of tenured liberals and putative radicals who contribute to a culture of conformism, which does not depend solely on the usual suspects (white guys in Harris tweed). When economist Ivy E. Broder of American University studied reviews of proposals for prestigious NSF grants, she discovered that "female reviewers rate female-authored papers lower than do their male colleagues." Shocked by the "significant downward bias. by female reviewers of female proposals," Broder concludes:

Many institutions, including NSF, have tried to solicit female reviewers for female proposals to avoid potential male bias against women. The evidence presented. suggests that this type of policy might have lowered women's opportunities rather than raised them and may account for some part of the underrepresentation of women in the senior ranks of the profession.3

In a brief paragraph, Hogan speculates that a woman "traumatized in her own tenure review due to the misogyny of her colleagues. might equally impose the same torture on women considered for tenure after her." But how pervasive this scenario is in academe is hard to ascertain, and accurate judgment is perhaps not advanced by Hogan's blanket judgment that "forms of intimidating harassment." toward nonwhites and women are "found all the time."

Clearly there are a lot of issues in the under-representation of females and people of color that Hogan ignores because of his preference for highlighting the grossest of double standards and Cro-Magnon varieties of sexism and racism. For instance, despite the claims of commentators such as Richard Blow in the New Republic that people of color are showered with Ph.D. scholarship money, the reality is that "underrepresented minority" Ph.D. candidates in science and engineering carry significantly higher debt loads than whites (NSF Issue Brief, 16 April 1999). Though some universities have granted extra time on the tenure clock, women encounter greater burdens balancing academic work with family life. Among faculty in the sciences, reports CPST [Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology] Comments (April-May 2002), "women with at least one child are 24% less likely to get tenure than men who become fathers." The average male full professor earns significantly more than female full professors: 12.3% higher in private and 11.5% more in public universities.

Finally, there are places with abysmal records of inclusion: at MIT between 1990 and 1998, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science added 28 males and no women to its faculty. This scenario would confirm Hogan in his view of a misogynistic culture of exclusion; but again these zones of systematic discrimination may require better illumination than Hogan's fixation on the viler incidents at tenure hearings. In any case, mild efforts at MIT to rectify this situation have suddenly provoked John Leo of U.S. News and World Report (8 April 2002) to claim that the affirmative action police are stalking the campus and making sure that "gender equity has replaced scientific merit.. And all without any real discussion or open debate. Amazing." In a textbook case of the "culture of conformism," it hardly bothered Leo and other detractors of reform that until the Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science (1999), "no woman professor had ever been a Department Head, or Center or Lab director in the history of MIT. In fact, there were no women in the administration of either Science or Engineering at the time of the study."4

Long ago, mainstream European commentators such as Tocqueville and J.S. Mill expressed the fear that conformity is the ascendant tendency among humankind. Hogan has provided a radical and more contemporary dissection of this phenomenon. It is unfortunate that he does not engage the arguments put forward by Barrington Moore, which, along with their radical social critique, convey a profound pessimism about revolutionary routes to alleviating human misery. In an afterword, Hogan mentions all too briefly what is at stake here. He reminds readers of psychological studies showing that the resistance of even a few people can touch off larger-scale rebellion. But the specter of hyperconformism will continue to haunt the twenty-first century. If resistance is to be mobilized, it may be through the work of intellectuals and social activists who can draw lessons from this compact guide to modern conformity and consent.

John Trumpbour
Harvard University Trade Union Program

NOTES

1. For these examples and quotations, see V.G. Kiernan's contribution to Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., Revolution in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 121-44.

2. For quotations and brief discussion of Lewis and Inge, see D.L. Le Mahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 108.

3. Ivy E. Broder, "Review of NSF Economics Proposals: Gender and Institutional Patterns," American Economic Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (Sept. 1993), 964-70. Phyllis Chesler in Woman's Inhumanity to Woman (2002) calls attention to Broder's finding that the small number of female positions in the academy may heighten a competitive, as opposed to solidaristic, spirit among women. As women gain a larger share of academic chairs, it may be useful to conduct a follow-up study.

4. This quotation is drawn from Overview: Reports of the Committee on the Status of Women Faculty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 2002), p. 10.

Regin Schmidt RED SCARE: FBI & THE ORIGINS OF ANTICOMMUNISM IN THE UNITED STATES (University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000).

The young lack a sense of history-of the Cold War, of anti-communism, of the vibrancy of progressive movements in the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, older activists discoursing on their history at first engaged in long needed self-criticism. The self-criticism then shifted, however, to blanket rejection of our progressive pasts-our victories as well as our defeats, our brave and honorable moments, and particularly a recollection of the hegemonic power of the U.S. state as a primary cause of our defeats. Plainly, the horrific record of state repression in America is being forgotten by the older radicals and is unfamiliar to the younger ones.

Regin Schmidt's book can help enormously in revisiting and reconstructing the role of state repression in manipulating, subverting, jailing, deporting, and killing leftists in the twentieth century. Schmidt has provided us with a data-rich account of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation took on its special role in crushing the left in America. His book is about the origins of the FBI in the old Bureau of Investigation in 1908 and its transformation into a state weapon in the struggle against perceived Bolshevism, anarchism, and communism in the aftermath of World War I. It is also about the continuity of state repression from the era of the Palmer Raids to Cold War America.

Schmidt argues that recently declassified information points to new explanations for the FBI's rise to prominence. Some researchers view the agency's rise as a response to mass hysteria, placing the root cause of anti-communism in the public at large. Schmidt, however, shows how popular attitudes about the Bolshevik/communist/anarchist threat emerge only after Attorney General Palmer and the FBI launched their campaigns of harassment, arrest, and deportation. In short, anti-communism as a public ideology was the creation of state institutions.

Another body of scholarly and journalistic literature places primary, indeed sole, responsibility for FBI misdeeds on the shoulders of its long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover. While Schmidt sees Hoover as the major protagonist in the FBI drama, he grounds Hoover's conduct in the context of state policy and bureaucratic interest.

Further, most studies of the FBI emphasize its role in shaping anti-communism after World War II. Schmidt, however, takes the reader back to the first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids for the origins of anti-communism. And, he claims, the campaign was constant from then through the Cold War period. The FBI and anti-communism are less visible from the mid-1920s until the depths of the Great Depression only because of the diminution of radical activities.

Schmidt clearly states his central thesis early in the book and demonstrates its accuracy through historical examination.

Just as the mushrooming federal agencies, bureaus, and commissions were employed to regulate the economy and ameliorate the most severe social consequences of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, [so also] the state during the first decades of the century increasingly used its resources to control, contain, and, in times of crisis, to repress social unrest and political opposition. Thus, the institutionalization of the FBI's political activities from 1919 was at bottom a part of the federalization of social control in the form of political surveillance.

This book provides an engaging, rich, detailed history of how the FBI served the social control functions of the state: harassing the left, supporting federal, state, and local politicians in their anti-communist campaigns, and responding with sympathy to corporate requests for assistance. It covers the campaign against the IWW, the 1919 strike wave, the Palmer Raids, the Seattle General Strike, and the deportation of radicals.

Red Scare is an important book. It should be read by older progressives to refresh their memories of real state repression in the United States. The book should be passed along to young activists, most of whom were not old enough to remember FBI harassment of Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s. And this book should be included as supplementary reading in university classes on U.S. history, American politics, and social movements.

Finally, the book makes crystal clear an important reality of struggles for social change. Social movements do not fall apart solely because of ideological rigidity or factionalism or egotism. The errors that come from our ranks have to be understood in the context of a continuous pattern of state repression. The sorry record of the FBI in the United States must not be forgotten. Red Scare will help us remember.

Harry Targ
Department of Political Science
Purdue University

DOKUMENTE ZUR GESCHICHTE DER KOMMUNISTISCHEN BEWEGUNG IN DEUTSCHLAND [Documents on the History of the Communist Movement in Germany] Reihe 1945/1946, 6 vols. Edited by Günter Benser and Hans-Joachim Krusch, K.G. Saur Verlag, Munich 1993-1997.

The documents published in these volumes are deposited in the Central Archive of the German Communist Party (KPD), which is now located in the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massen- organisationen der DDR (SAPMO) in Berlin. The volumes cover the central body of party documents from July 1945 to April 1946, i.e., from the KPD's return to legality in Germany after World War 2 until the merger with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet Occupation Zone to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

The documents include: vol. 1) minutes of decisions taken in the 68 meetings held by the Secretariat of the Central Committee during that period, including various hitherto unpublished annexes, e.g., reports on the situation of the KPD in the British, American, and French Occupation Zones; vol. 2) minutes of the extended meetings held by the Secretariat of the Central Committee from July 1945 to February 1946; vol. 3) minutes of several concurrent KPD national conferences (Reichsberatung) 8-9 January 1946; vol. 4) minutes of the party conference of 2-3 March 1946; and vol. 5) stenographic protocol of the 15th Party Congress (19-20 April 1946) and of earlier conferences on economic problems and on cultural issues. The sixth volume contains the indexes, an analytic table of contents, and a chronological list of documents, minutes and protocols additionally broken down, thus facilitating the location of the relevant pages in the first five volumes. In practice this works well. Furthermore, there are indexes of the approximately 1750 individuals and the 1200 geographical references, corrections of errors (relatively few in number), and four maps of the KPD's party precincts in 1945 and 1946.

In addition to the documents of the national bodies of the party, there is also regionally significant material in the form of reports by local area organizations, as well as some supplementary material from the personal archive of the party chairman, Wilhelm Pieck, including notes taken by him during and after conversations with various persons, and at a number of meetings from which no other authentic material is available. Whenever possible, the sources are reproduced as facsimiles with handwritten notes, etc.; some few pages have had to be rewritten as the originals were too damaged to be reproduced.

Whereas the minutes of decisions taken by the Secretariat of the Central Committee (five people) in volume 1 concentrated on the organizational restoration of the party as a lawful mass party (in April 1946 it had approximately 800,000 members), the extended meetings of the Secretariat reflect the political discussions taking place in the party, the attitudes and considerations of the party leadership, and the criticism to which it was exposed by members. This is also demonstrated by the minutes of the national conferences at which the delegates from the local precincts had a chance to voice their opinions (vol. 3).

One important issue was the agricultural reform carried out in the Soviet Zone, where the land belonging to the aristocracy was far more extensive than in the three western zones. There were several reasons for the agricultural reform: for one thing, it was important to establish a basis for the new democracy in the rural areas, and this was certainly not possible with the Junkers in possession of the land; for another, land had to be provided to the Germans expelled from areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse; and, finally, land had to be provided to the agricultural laborers living in the Soviet Zone. The purpose was to establish a democratically inclined group of people who knew whom they had to thank for their croft/homestead, viz., the democratic state. (The notion might be sound, but experience from Finland during the inter-war years shows that the newly established small farms there became a hotbed of the fascist Lappo-movement in the 1930s; this problem therefore requires a more thorough examination.) It emerges very clearly from the minutes that there was no agreement in the KPD concerning the tactical approach to this issue.

Originally, the editors were active in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the German Democratic Republic; they were historians with close links to the party. They all lost their jobs when the GDR was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany; however, their work in publishing these documents represents a major contribution to our understanding not only of the KPD, but of overall German developments immediately after the end of the war. The editors, who are masters of their profession, have refrained from making direct comments on the sources in the forewords to the volumes, and have instead chosen to work on the material elsewhere (e.g. Günter Benser in the periodical Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 2/1997). However, they have aided our understanding by providing more than 7000 notes or comments on individuals and events mentioned in the sources.

It must be assumed that we shall only be able to interpret the full meaning of the sources once we have the corresponding documents from the other German parties and from the occupation powers. Beginnings in this direction have so far been made only for the SPD and the Soviet Union. This is a pattern which is unlikely to surprise anyone: archives of non-Socialist parties and governments are normally kept inaccessible for much longer than those of the labor movement. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the archives of the German bourgeois parties from the corresponding period will have survived in anything like the same state of completeness: all the bourgeois parties that we know of for that period were only established slowly, and, unlike the KPD and the SPD, they were new parties. The fact that setting them up was such a slow process¾particularly in the three western Occupation Zones¾was due to the wish on the part of the Occupation Powers to be able to control developments completely. In this context, independent German political parties would have been a disturbing factor, especially since many Germans were desirous of seeing a showdown with the economic structures that had led to the victory of Nazism. This, however, was not in keeping with the perceived self-interest of the Western Powers: they wanted to see Germany re-established on a bourgeois-democratic foundation. Consequently, as far as the bourgeois parties are concerned, other types of archives must be resorted to¾typically personal archives.

The sources published here also shed light on international issues¾both generally and with specific reference to international Communism. 1945 and 1946 are the years of preparation for the Cold War, which was proclaimed, for example, in Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. This turn of phrase was a clear opening move in the game to combat Communism, now that Nazism had failed in that same mission. By contrast, the material presented in these volumes demonstrates with surprising clarity that the Soviet party and state leadership was not particularly interested in deepening the conflicts among the allied powers; rather, it was aiming at peaceful coexistence and was, in fact, willing to pursue an appeasement policy to achieve this objective. This is natural enough considering the destruction wrought against the Soviet Union by the Nazi forces and the fact that the US held a nuclear monopoly.

In Germany the consequence was that the KPD pursued a policy aimed at completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution that had been initiated in 1918. This meant a break with the revolutionary policy which the party had pursued till then, but the break was effected by the leadership despite opposition on the part of important segments of the rank and file membership. This emerges very clearly from the body of documents. It also reveals what problems concerned the KPD leadership on a day-to-day basis, what information was available to it, and why it promoted and accelerated the merger with the SPD in the Soviet Occupation Zone to establish the SED in April 1946.

Of course, in themselves these documents cannot explain everything, but they do provide an important contribution to understanding the positions of the Soviet Union and international Communism during those years. Following the publication of these documents, developments can be assessed on a far more certain basis. They also make possible a more informed discussion of whether or not the KPD pursued an independent policy for Germany, whether the party was tied to general Communist policies, and to what extent, if at all, the party influenced (independently of the Soviet Union) the positions of other Communist parties. There is evidence in the present material that calls into question the mono-causal explanatory models which have been prevalent for so long and which always conclude that Stalin¾and his system¾is to "blame" (see also Patrick Flaherty, "Origins of the Cold War: New Evidence," Monthly Review, May 1996).

As far as can now be estimated, a few years after the end of World War 2, and with the outbreak of the Cold War, a sectarian and dogmatic political line developed in the Soviet Union, spilling over internationally into the other Communist parties (with the exception of Yugoslavia). This line can be associated with Stalin, but the documents published here indicate that the leading strata of the CPSU, in the final phase of the war and for some years after, pursued a bourgeois-democratic approach. In this pursuit they were backed by, among others, the leadership of the KPD; but other Communist parties pursued a similar line¾which did not, to be sure, help them to achieve those positions in bourgeois society that they considered necessary to advance their program on the basis of parliamentary rule. By 1948, the Communist parties, despite having thoroughly compromised themselves, had to leave all the coalition governments in which they had participated.

The editors deny that the KPD departed from Marxism- Leninism, but they do admit that contemporary observers perceived KPD positions as being very different from those of earlier days (vol. 1, p. 11). Until then the KPD had been an opposition party¾the editors do not use the term "revolutionary"¾but now it seized the chance to take a constructive part in anti-fascist, democratic restoration activities, and consequently also with the Occupation Forces, particularly the Soviet military administration (vol. 1, pp. 13, 19). The editors' rather knowledgeable introduction to the work as a whole does not problematize KPD assessments of the situation in the time immediately after the war, which was, in fact, a turn to the right well suited to create new illusions to replace the old. It is relevant in this context to read the contemporary comments made by August Thalheimer, the spokesperson of the Communist Opposition, published in support of an independent Communist policy from his exile in Cuba (republished in Westblock-Ostblock. Welt- und Deutschlandpolitik nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Internationale monatliche Übersichten 1945-48, Bremen 1992).

Another central question concerned the relationship with the SPD. A number of other countries witnessed negotiations for unity between the Social Democratic and Communist parties in the post-war years, and, as a rule in Western Europe, they did not lead to any mergers despite strong wishes for them in the working-class population. The all-important political issue at the different KPD conferences in the spring of 1946 was, however, relations with the Social Democrats. Therefore, this is a relevant issue, which can now be discussed on a better foundation than previously. In Germany the debate concerning this issue was very hot in 1996, the 50th anniversary of the merger in the Eastern Zone. That year saw the publication of a number of contemporary SPD documents¾but with nothing like the density and completeness we find in the present KPD collection. Moreover, in the case of the SPD we are dealing with a selection of documents, and it is therefore difficult to assess whether or not they are representative of the actual developments.

The sources in volume 3 indicate a considerable range in per- ceptions and assessments of current activities. Assessments depended on, among other things, the geographical areas in which Communists were active. In the British and US Zones, the Occupation Forces prevented the establishment of a free and democratic party system; in particular the central political structures encountered obstruction on the part of the military administration. In the French Zone there was a direct ban on the establishment of political organizations. The KPD leadership chose to disregard this state of affairs, and tried to build up the party as a popular party, a mode that only became fashionable in the 1960s. While in the Soviet Zone the two working-class parties merged into the SED, in the Western zones the Social Democratic leadership rejected such a merger.

According to the leadership, the KPD was to become the mass party of the German people, capable of assimilating people from all social strata and thus ceasing to be a purely working-class party. However, exceptions were made: Nazis and previously expelled Communists could not be admitted to the party. That was the position of the leadership; party representatives in the Western zones reflected a more traditional perception of the tasks of the party, in part, on the basis of an ultra-left position, for instance in Hamburg.

The three sets of minutes/protocols contained in volume 5 were also published in a contemporary version; according to the editors, the discrepancies between the printed versions and the stenographic ones published here are not considerable, yet they are there, and in some cases they are the result of political "editing"; however, the editors have not been able to determine who was responsible for them, or whether the original speakers had sanctioned them. The contemporary minutes/protocols are hard to come by, and for this reason the editors have thought it important to see them published in a form that must be considered impeccable from a scholarly point of view. The minutes/protocols reflect the completion of the 11-month process in which the KPD had developed its organization and its political foundation to include positions on all major issues following twelve years of Nazism.

All things considered, the conclusion must be that this extensive and very carefully annotated edition constitutes an important step forward, because it makes previously unknown internal sources accessible to study and research. The five source-volumes provide us with good insights into KPD assessments and considerations immediately following World War 2. Most notably, they reproduce the party's tactical and strategic proposals concerning a pan-German development, which was the prevalent view of the way ahead on the part of the general public. But the documents also allow us to gain an insight into the development of international Communist policies applied specifically to Germany. The Communist parties were working to continue the anti-Hitler coalition of the war years, without, apparently, recognizing that the war had been a conflict between two imperialist blocs, which the Soviet Union had successfully managed to keep out of for nearly two years by means of the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact. The parties did not see, and perhaps did not want to acknowledge, that the wartime coalition would be replaced by renewed conflicts between the US and its allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. Whether this is attributed to the hypothesis that the Soviet Union represented a socialist system and the Western Powers the capitalist system, or whether both blocs are perceived as imperialist really does not matter; the conflicts were there. The sources now available provide us with the means to examine the underlying factors at work.

Gerd Callesen
Arbejderbevaegelsens bibliotek og arkiv
[Labor Movement Library and Archive]
Copenhagen

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe Januar bis Dezember 1855. Hans-Jürgen Bochinski, Martin Hundt et al. (eds.), GESAMTAUSGABE (MEGA) Sec. I, Vol. 14 (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 2001).

Last year saw the publication of two volumes in the series Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works (CW). These volumes contain Engels' letters to his friends and comrades-in-arms for the period 1887-92. According to the publishers, volume 50 will be published in the course of the next year, and thus the first comprehensive publication of Marx's and Engels' works will be available in English. Corresponding editions are available in Russian, German, Czech, Bulgarian, Italian (not fully completed yet), and French.

Parallel with the publication of these "works editions," a "Gesamtausgabe" (MEGA) has been published from 1975 onwards, containing all the writings and manuscripts left behind by Marx and Engels. What is the difference between a "works edition" and a "Gesamtausgabe"? A "works edition" publishes, in any given language, the known writings, manuscripts, and letters by Marx and Engels. By contrast, the "Gesamtausgabe" contains, in the original languages, all the material left behind by the two men, including all known letters written to them. The explanatory notes and the indexes-names, subjects, periodicals and literature mentioned in the letters-are much more extensive. It is a scholarly edition at a very high level-what is known in German as a "historisch-kritisch" edition.

"Historisch-kritisch" entails a very exact processing of the manuscripts, a very precise description of their genesis, and full annotation. The form chosen, together with the principle of publishing every part of the material, means that this edition will consist of 114 very comprehensive volumes-the most recent one takes up 1695 pages-and that it will not be completed for another 10 to 20 years, if at all. It goes without saying that the problem of procuring funding is due to the political tenor of the texts. Incidentally, the volume under preparation in the USA has achieved adequate funding.

This "Gesamtausgabe" constitutes the second attempt to publish all the written material left behind by Marx and Engels. The first attempt was made during the years between the two world wars, but was discontinued after the publication of volume 13. After the end of World War 2 there was a discussion lasting several years about making a second attempt, and in 1975 the publication of this new edition was begun. The publishers were the Institutes of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow and Berlin, and they submitted two test volumes to the interested public for discussion.

The original plan was to publish 100 volumes to be completed over 25 years. But the job grew along the way-at one point 180 volumes were planned. After the breakdown of the GDR and the Soviet Union, a new publisher had to be found, viz., the Internationale Marx-Engels Stiftung (IMES, the Marx-Engels Foundation), located in Amsterdam, at the International Institute for Social History (IISG). As a first step, the IMES appointed a commission to evaluate the project, the volumes published so far, and the guidelines to be observed. The commission recognized the high scholarly level achieved in the approximately 42 volumes published so far, and resolved that publication was to be continued. The number of volumes was reduced to 114 without abandoning the principle that all the material left behind by Marx and Engels would be published. The reduction was achieved by avoiding duplication of material, and by omitting any introductory assessments which, before 1990, had attempted to adjust texts to the Marxist- Leninist ideology. This was in keeping with the declared objective of depoliticizing the edition while making it more scholarly.

The early 1990s saw the publication of a number of volumes that were so near completion that they could only be published in accordance with the old guidelines (however without the intro- ductions); after that, there was an interruption in publication which lasted for several years. Not until 1998 was a new volume published, and the years since then have seen the publication of another five volumes. This year (2002) at least two volumes will appear. Thus, publication goes on at a slow pace, but it does go on.

The edition is subdivided into four sections. The first contains all works, articles, and dissertations; the second, Capital and preparatory studies; the third, correspondence; and the fourth, excerpts from books written by other authors, notes, and other types of material. The most recent volume in the fourth section includes, for instance, the famous Theses on Feuerbach. Virtually none of the material in the 32 volumes of this section has ever been published before; so far, 10 of its volumes have appeared. As for the third section, it includes not only the roughly 4000 known letters from Marx and Engels, but also about 10,000 letters written to them. The result is that this section will become the most extensive one, with a total of 35 volumes, 10 of which are already out. This constitutes a fantastic extension of the material available, and provides for a much more profound understanding of developments than the separate publications of letters to the Italians, to individuals like August Bebel, etc. The second section covers the very extensive preparatory studies to Capital, which up to now have only been accessible in fragmented form, mostly still in manuscript. The existing 17 volumes out of the total 24 of this section have already provided the basis for extensive discussion of such matters as Engels' adaptation of Capital vols. 2 and 3.

Half of the volumes planned for section 1, i.e. 16 volumes, have been published; these are, in the main, well known texts; however, through an intensive research effort, several new texts have been located, and others have been clarified. This apparent in the volume under review (vol. I-14), which consists of articles written in 1855 for the newspapers Neue Oder-Zeitung (NOZ) and the New York (Daily) Tribune (NYT). In addition to these approximately 200 articles, there is one somewhat lengthier article by Engels in Putnam's Monthly, "The Armies of Europe." The volume contains everything published in the year 1855, including 33 newly found articles. In this volume and in keeping with the principles of publication, approximately half of the texts are in English. The articles for which authorship remains uncertain or for which the NYT editors seem to have intervened notably are printed in an appendix.

Marx's and Engels' collaboration with the New York Tribune and its editor, Charles Anderson Dana, extended from 1851 to 1862 and led to jobs for other periodicals and to extensive contributions on their part to the New American Cyclopaedia. These were very important jobs for the two-for Marx in particular as he had no other income beyond what he and Engels earned for their writings. It appears that Engels at that time had no other way of assisting Marx financially than by writing several articles in Marx's name. In fact, collaboration with the NYT was begun by a lengthy series of articles "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany" (1851-52), published in Marx's name, but actually written by Engels. This fiction was kept up throughout the period of their collaboration with the NYT, and it is only after the publication of the Marx-Engels correspondence that it has become clear which writings are attributable to Marx and which to Engels. Their cooperation was to become even more far-reaching, as it has become clear that for the year 1855 the reports and analyses that Marx wrote to the NOZ were very often pure summaries and translations of Engels' articles in the NYT. Obviously, it was only possible for the two authors to work so closely together because of their fundamental congruity of thought-a circumstance which ought to give pause to those who have posited an inconsistency between Marx and Engels.

The following period of 11 years, during which so much of their writing was for American publications, is not without interest for the subsequent evolution of their theoretical works: it is obvious that Marx has recycled material from that period in those manuscripts that are now being published in the second section of MEGA. The material is also extremely relevant for the development of the political aspects of Marxism. For a long time, Marx worked exclusively as a journalist and editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, the Brüsseler Deutsche Zeitung, and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and he contributed to a number of others, such as the labor newspaper The People's Paper, Das Volk, and also the democratic paper, the Neue Oder-Zeitung. This means that a considerable proportion of the two authors' production consists of newspaper articles, like, for example, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which was intended for the weekly magazine Die Revolution, published in New York.

Essential elements of Marxism were only developed through journalistic work. For example, it was only in connection with editing an article describing how "poor people" stole waste firewood, that it became clear to Marx what material necessity actually meant for the vast majority of the population. It is easy to discern that in 1855 his journalism was very much concerned with the economic implications of the political and military events taking place at the time. However, reading these articles will also reveal other lines of thought. For both Marx and Engels it was important to set out the facts on which their analyses were based. It is well known that Marx and Engels to some degree suffered from Russophobia-in part because the Czarist Empire was, in fact, the great counter-revolutionary power of the time, a regime which, in the name of "the Holy Alliance" strove to maintain the existing social order. To secure this aim, Russia was willing to deploy her troops against terrorists and rogue states. In this respect Russia was in agreement with the France of Napoleon III, and there was a long-lasting close cooperation between the two powers. Internationalization of events began to play a prominent role in Marx's and Engels' journalism.

However, in 1855 there was no Franco-Russian co-operation; on the contrary, at that time, the Crimean War pitted France, Great Britain, and some other allies against Russia. In the present MEGA volume, the economic and political implications are subjected to a detailed discussion, and Engels also carries out a military analysis of important battles (e.g., Sevastopol), examining the strengths and compositions of the respective armies. These analyses make for fascinating reading as they evolve over the year. Reading them in sequence provides the reader with a good understanding of events, more so than the contemporary reader would have been able to deduce.

In this volume, Marx's multi-faceted discussion of British parliamentarism can be read in the context of his assessment of the party system, of the role of parliamentary opposition, and of the impact of the press on public opinion. Criticism of the Bonapartist system (as distinct from the Bonapartist coup described in The 18th Brumaire), and in particular of the role played by Napoleon III himself, is further developed. The volume also contains a series of articles by Engels on Pan-Slavism (from the NOZ), supplemented by a draft intended either for these articles or for a more exhaustive dissertation which he planned to write on the phenomenon of Pan-Slavism. The assessments propounded in these articles are correlated with those raised in the revolution of 1848-49. Subsequently, Engels has been criticized, most extensively by Roman Rosdolsky, for his evaluation of peoples like the Czechs, Slovenians, Croats, etc., as being "nonhistoric," i.e., being doomed to national disappearance into the surrounding larger nations-in this case the Hungarians and the Germans-because in their (embryonic) struggle for national independence they joined forces with reactionary powers in the revolution of 1848-49 and turned against the democratic movement among Hungarians and Germans. At a later time, Engels revised his position as the emergence of an industrial working class and a labor movement within these nations made them part of the general progressive trend. Already in 1896 in the preface to the German edition of Revolution and Counter- Revolution in Germany, Kautsky (who still thought Marx was the author of the articles) explains this theoretical position. The fact that Engels' perception of the Nation is very far removed from nationalism will be seen from a comparison with the nationalism of Napoleon III.

The present volume, together with volumes 10 to 13 of this section, volumes 3-7 of the third section and volumes 7-9 of the fourth section (covering 1849-1851), makes it possible to assess Marx's and Engels' development from the end of the 1848 revolutions until the mid-1850s. Until now it was not possible to follow developments with the same degree of precision. Volumes 13 and 14 of the CW, published in 1980, cover the same period as this MEGA volume; some texts, however, appear only in the MEGA volume, as they were not discovered until the mid-1980s.

In connection with the publication of MEGA, extensive research takes place: in the course of the 1980s, the University of Leipzig in the former GDR made extensive efforts to find possible articles in the three editions of the NYT (daily, semi-weekly, and weekly); these investigations were in part based on the correspondence between Marx and Engels. It is a serious difficulty that in 1855 Dana published Marx's articles anonymously and as leading articles without any byline or other form of identification; that often he would split up one article into several, and so on. Examination has led to the identification of 20 articles attributable to Engels and another 10 that could be by Marx or Engels.

To make these partial results quickly accessible, and to disseminate the theoretical significance of the research, several publications are available. These include: an annual Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch, published jointly by the two institutes in Moscow and Berlin; a Russian bulletin was published in Moscow; and three semi-internal newsletters that were published in Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin in the GDR. Today a yearbook, Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge, is published by the Argument publishing house in Berlin/ Hamburg. In this series additional volumes are published; so far, three have seen the light of day, dealing with the history of the various Marx-Engels editions. The articles published in the Beiträge are mostly in German, but some are in English. The same applies to the periodical published by IMES, MEGA-Studien, which is, in principle, written in French, English, and German, but with a preponderance of German-language articles. Without any ties to the MEGA, there is a French periodical (Actuel Marx) and an English yearbook (Studies in Marxism), which both include articles of immediate relevance for this comprehensive edition. In number 31-32 (1998) of the periodical Critique, published in Glasgow, there are several articles in English on the MEGA. In any case, all the MEGA volumes are available in the Tamiment Library at New York University.

It is a significant factor in this publication odyssey that in order to promote scholarly internationalization and to preempt any one country from monopolizing this work, groups of volunteer researchers in several countries, e.g., Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the USA, are deeply involved in the project.

Gerd Callesen
Arbejderbevaegelsens bibliotek og arkiv
[Labor Movement Library and Archive]
Copenhagen

Frank Rosengarten, THE WRITINGS OF THE YOUNG MARCEL PROUST (1885-1900): AN IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

When approaching the early works of Marcel Proust, students of À la recherche du temps perdu hope to find the matrix-historical, literary, philosophical, and other-within which he initially conceived and developed his magnum opus. Frank Rosengarten's study provides an analysis of Proust's pre-Recherche work that illuminates both the literary inventions that would find their way into Recherche and the laboratory-the socioliterary context¾in which these came to fruition. At the same time, even more importantly, through thoughtful consideration of Proust's early writings¾especially his reflections on John Ruskin, the collection of stories entitled Les plaisirs et les jours, and the unfinished Jean Santeuil¾Rosengarten presents a book that takes these works seriously in their own right.

This dual concern permeates Rosengarten's discussion. The entire trajectory of the book as an ideological critique follows a similarly dialectical framework: while never doubting or decrying the importance of "poetic" readings of Proust based on the idealist and spiritualist topoi so prevalent in his writings, Rosengarten argues that such readings are "not wrong but simply one-sided and incomplete" (1). Rosengarten seeks to establish the ideological currents in Proust's pre-Recherche writing, as well as to map the socio-historical landscape that informed it, in a manner not counter to, but very much consonant with critical writings outside the historical-materialist tradition. In so doing, Rosengarten depicts a young Proust who, while original and innovative, remains tethered to the social and literary conventions of his milieu.

Given Rosengarten's skillful dialectical thought and rhetoric, it is no surprise that he locates his study in the lineage of Marxist theory. In clarifying the grounds for his use of the term "ideology," as well as in spelling out his understanding of ideological criticism, Rosengarten draws on Raymond Williams' seminal book Marxism and Literature (ideology as "the material social process of signification itself") and also on the work of Gramsci, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Eagleton, Althusser, Lukács, Benjamin, and Marx. Adorno's engagements with Proust are notably absent, though they might shed light on Proust as an idealist and Platonist (see Adorno's "Short Commentaries on Proust," in Notes to Literature, Vol. 1). More to the matter of methodology, Rosengarten very explicitly gleans his use of the term "subject" from Althusser. The subject is one who individually elaborates his or her own ideology, but does so only within the context of having submitted to some form of higher authority. Such a conception of the "subject" aids in understanding Proust as belonging to a particular historical moment, milieu, and tradition.

Along with tracing this methodological Marxist tradition, Rosengarten also acknowledges other secondary accounts of Proust's work, in particular those studies which bear most immediately on ideology, e.g., Michael Sprinker's History and Ideology in Proust. While giving a lucid summary of Sprinker's analysis, Rosengarten notes that it tends toward the historical more than the literary, and in so doing risks clouding some of Proust's finer textual and poetic qualities. However, in a telling remark that no doubt reflects his own hopes and intentions, Rosengarten argues that this pitfall of ideological critique is at once the risk that must be run and what must be avoided, in order to preserve dialectical integrity. On this point of balancing historical research and literary (that is, textual) analysis, The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust proves eminently successful.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Socioliterary World of the Young Proust," demonstrates through stories of Proust's school days, his early relationships with friends and lovers, and particular letters and lesser known publications, how the young Proust's worldview was formed through family, school, literary reviews, and social life (salons and school friends). Part II, "Literary and Ideological Crosscurrents in Pleasures and Days," continues the joint project of literary and historical analyses, taking as its primary object Proust's Les plaisirs et les jours (which contains nearly sixty individual stories/poems/fragments). This section flows with particular elegance. It moves from an initial focus on the various incarnations of the book to a formal study of its structure and aesthetics. Rosengarten then shifts to a well-crafted interrogation of politically charged themes of spiritualism and elitism, culminating with an examination of intertextuality. Thus, Part II slides from an intense focus on Les Plaisirs to theoretical and poetic resonances and relationships to other texts. In Part III, Rosengarten yet again balances historical and literary analysis, chronicling through a study of the Ruskin pieces and of Jean Santeuil, how Proust's aesthetic theory matured. Jean Santeuil, a 150-page text, was not published during Proust's lifetime, in fact was never finished, and is posited as a sort of "workshop" that eventually found its better and polished form in À la recherche du temps perdu. The chapter on Jean Santeuil provides the most direct engagement with political themes, where Rosengarten finds the opportunity to seek out Proust's ideological undercurrents of community¾so rarely available due to Proust's seemingly constant tropes of individualism and interiority.

Several themes of the book illustrate the originality and profundity of Rosengarten's treatment. In Part I, Rosengarten follows the young Proust's homosexual impulses, both biograph- ically and as they emerge in his writing. The short story "Avant la nuit" deals explicitly with homosexuality and helps, along with a couple of letters to school friends, to foreground the idea that Proust, even at an early age, possessed a self-confidence about the sexual realm. The importance here is that Proust "discovered his literary vocation at the same time that he fully acknowledged his sexual sensibilities and identity" (38). The result, Rosengarten states,

from a broadly ideological point of view is that Proust's early response to the privileged social and intellectual milieu he frequented was marked, on the one hand by acceptance of established models, and on the other hand by a defiance of boundaries and by the courage to be different. (39)

In his typically rigorous dialectical manner, Rosengarten thus gives voice to both sides of what is always an important sticking point in Proust scholarship, the figure of homosexuality. In doing so, he balances literary and historical-materialist concerns while maintaining a generous and thoughtful ideological critique.

Rosengarten's treatment of class issues in Proust is also noteworthy. In a chapter entitled "Elitism and the Primacy of the Spiritual," Rosengarten confronts head-on the implications of Proust's elitism. He does this by examining the themes of individuality and spirituality (a form of idealism) in Proust, arriving at the following summation:

After all, Proust himself, the scion of a wealthy and privileged family, was not ready in the mid-1890's to challenge the social order that had spawned him and given him the means with which to assert himself as a writer and moralist. He was inclined toward nuances, not to stark confrontations. For this reason, even while noting his dislike of discriminatory social practices and attitudes, we have to grant the possibility that in this as in most other aspects of his life, Proust was ambivalent and thought that certain types of snobbery were compatible with spiritual and intellectual distinction.

Perhaps the best example of reading generously while maintaining the integrity of a careful materialist critique comes in the concluding chapter, "Literary Text and Ideology in Jean Santeuil." Drawing on Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, Rosengarten points to Jean Santeuil as a work in which the otherwise pervasive textual Stimmung of pessimism is lifted and a hopeful and optimistic poetic vision of the natural world is rendered. This meditation on the possibility of spiritual communion and universal harmony, Rosengarten suggests, expresses a symbolic understanding of what Jameson calls the destiny of community. Characteristically, Rosengarten does not let such a claim go unproblematized, stating quite frankly that "Proust's characters do not participate in any kind of collective struggle" (202). However, insofar as they seem deeply despaired of finding any spiritual communion or universal harmony in human society, the exuberant and spiritualized discourse of nature in Jean Santeuil may indeed be the symbolic unconscious in Proust-it may derive from what Rosengarten quotes Bakhtin as calling "historical poetics."

Overall, Rosengarten's analysis is at once incisive, original, generous, recuperative, and critical. For scholars and admirers of Proust, this book fills a gap by offering an ideological critique and socioliterary portrait of the young Proust and his writings. And, for those studying in the wide wake of Marxism, the book is an excellent example of the potential for materialism and literature as a project.

J.D. Mininger
Ph.D. student, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities


Three Short Works on Cuba
1. Lilah Rosenblum, A TIME FOR CHANGE: RETHINKING US-CUBA POLICY (Washington Office on Latin America [WOLA], Washington, D.C. 2002). 75pp

Lilah Rosenblum, WOLA's Special Assistant on Cuba, has produced a useful booklet on US policy toward Cuba. Its fundamental premise is that this policy "has not been formulated on the basis of sound judgements about strategies that will best promote human rights and social justice on the island, but on the basis of outdated Cold War ideology and special interest group politics." The first section discusses what's wrong with US Cuba policy, noting that it is inhumane, ineffective, unpopular, and unrealistic. The author then briefly examines why the embargo¾the keystone of US policy¾still exists, concluding that the answer lies in domestic politics. She notes the well organized and financed Cuban lobby centered in Miami and New Jersey, and its contributions to key right-wing policy makers in Congress. She examines the generalized hostility toward Fidel Castro and the Revolution that still permeates much policy thinking and shows that, until very recently, no strong constituency in favor of lifting the embargo has emerged. Since Cuba does not pose any direct military or other threat to the US and since that country no longer supports armed revolutionary groups in Latin America, these types of security concern no longer apply. In fact, internal stability in Cuba is in the US's long and short range interest. She states that there is much to criticize about human rights and Cuban democracy, but she sees the US in no position to take the moral high ground given its hostile acts toward that country. She fails to note, however, that the US holds many more political prisoners than does Cuba, and that basic democratic rights are regularly trampled here (e.g., the Miami Five, Mumia, Peltier; inequality in education, housing, etc.). Nor does she mention that convicted terrorists are walking around free in Miami.

The author suggests that any new policy among other things should restablish commercial relations, encourage exchanges between the two countries, allow US NGOs to operate freely on the island, explore common interests such as drug interdiction (one of the few areas where limited cooperation has taken place), and move to normalize diplomatic relations. The US should make clear its differences with the Cuban system within the context of respect for Cuban sovereignty. The text further suggests effective ways to support reform within Cuba, but warns that any policy changes may not produce instant results. Appendices to the text include a timeline of US-Cuban relations, myths and facts about the embargo, a list of organizations opposed to the ban on the food and medicines, responses to the standard arguments for maintaining current US policy, a list of Web resources on Cuba, and a bibliography.

As a whole this booklet is useful for its information and could make a nice teaching tool. A socialist observer might note, however, that it has not included Cuban points of view and that it views Cuba in liberal bourgeois terms rather than understanding the island's particular version of socialist society and development. Perhaps more naively, it assumes that capitalism can tolerate a socialist government in its own backyard.

In February and March of 2002 a delegation of US labor and employment lawyers and trade unionists traveled to Cuba. They visited a variety of workplaces in city and countryside and met with Cubans from shop floors to the highest levels of the CTC (Cuba's trade union confederation). This document is their report. They framed their work around three questions: What can US and Cuban labor and employment lawyers and trade unionists learn from each other? Are Cuban trade unions effective representatives of their members' interests? And, how can Cuban workers live on salaries of around $20 a month? The main body of the text is devoted to recounting group experiences and what the visitors learned from their Cuban counterparts and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. Besides giving context for a US audience, the authors discuss topics like: work environment, labor-management relations, collective bargaining, union structures, membership and training, social benefits above wages (ranging from health and education to family care and maternity leave), and problems created within the working class by the new dual economy (dollar vs peso sectors). In addition, a section treats politics and elections plus, importantly, the role of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) in the workplace.

The expository material and conclusions are couched in cautious and often qualified terms, perhaps reflecting the group's legal bent. Nevertheless, a number of theses come through. Unions and the CTC are not rubber stamps for the Party. Cuban union officials are sophisticated and clearly articulate the interests of the workers. Unions have succeeded, to a degree, in attaining many of their goals and, in specific instances, have proven instrumental in bringing about changes in policy at the national level (e.g. the law regarding worker contributions to Social Security taxes, which unions opposed and which was dropped). The report concludes that each side can learn a great deal from the other (e.g., Cuban non-antagonistic management-labor relations represent an important example for US workers) and that visits should continue in future years. In sum, the document makes for interesting reading for those concerned with both Cuban and US labor. As the authors note, workers in both countries have common interests such as combating unchecked globalization and, concretely, the FTAA as presently constituted. Progressive sectors of the US labor movement would do well to read this report and to use it as a basis for persuading workers that proletarian interests are stronger than narrow nationalistic political ones, and that other labor systems have much to teach workers in this country.

This study covers varied aspects of labor policy and labor relations inside Cuba. It is based on personal visits to work-sites and interviews with a variety of officials, professionals, and unionists, as well as extensive research. It focuses particularly upon workers' rights and participation, how labor policy is developed and by whom, and the organization and functions of unions in the workplace and outside. One interesting theme is the new management and operational system (perfeccionamiento empresarial¾what Evanson calls the Decentralized Management System or DMS), first instituted in 1998 and now slowly spreading in the state sector of the economy.

After some historical and contemporary background material which includes remarks about the structure and function of the CTC and unions, Evanson presents six chapters covering respectively: employment and hiring practices, salary and other remuneration, collective bargaining, grievance procedures, social security and benefits, and foreign investment. The appendices list US project-advisers, work centers visited in Cuba, and persons interviewed, and also include tables showing distribution of workers by economic sector, category, and gender as of 1999.

Evanson, an attorney who has written extensively on Cuba and its legal system, is currently president of the Latin American Institute for Legal Services. Her study is richly documented. While the conclusions reached in the first chapters will come as little surprise to students of Cuban labor or society, some nonetheless bear mention. The CTC and unions play a dual role: to enhance the economic, social, and political interests of the country; and to advance the interests of workers. A clear separation exists between the CCP and the union movement, although clearly like all Cuban institutions the CTC recognizes the primacy of the Party. The CTC can and does influence the course of legislation. Unions today play a stronger role in the enterprise (and at the national level we might add) than they have previously. In the areas of worker-management relations, workers' rights (sick leave, unemployment, etc.), and opportunities available to workers (training, job upgrades, etc.), Evanson leaves no doubt that the Cuban system is far more humane than its US counterpart. Workers' rights in grievances are respected for the most part; pay differentials between management and workers are usually less than 2:1; and efforts are made to keep workers in productive jobs and to reincorporate them into the work force if they should leave for any reason. The author does note that pay scales across the board¾even when including the extensive social wage¾are low. Further, workers with access to dollars are far better off than those without, a source of irritation among workers as well as throughout Cuban society.

The more original part of this work is the discussion of foreign investment and the DMS. In response to the crisis that enveloped the country after 1989 (see S&D #29, Cuba in the 1990s), Cuba took a number of bold measures. It moved to decentralize the economy, placed enterprises on an accountability system, and delegated far more power locally than before. A controlled opening to foreign investment formed a part of the reform package as did a gradual implementation of DMS. The new system forced labor into a different role. In a flash, worker well-being became dependent upon enterprise efficiency, ability to engage constructively with management, and unit productivity. Since each work-site could now set salaries (within limits), the incentives became obvious. Most observers agree that this new system appears to have taken hold. My own experience (on a trip this past Winter) was that workers were enthusiastic about DMS where it had been started and eager for it to instituted where it had not. The down side, not addressed by Evanson, is the real possibility that Cuba will tend toward a market economy akin to that of the capitalist world.

Overall, the DMS experiment appears as a solid step toward economic growth. Problems in the foreign sector are similar: how to encourage and cultivate foreign capital without losing the socialist component. The labor movement, for example, successfully campaigned against the provision in the draft law governing foreign investment that would have allowed foreign companies to control hiring. Jobs in joint ventures are highly sought after, not only for higher pay scales but because a part of wages (supplements) is paid in dollars. But here too the specter of inequalities and violation of the basic social contract loom. In the end, Evanson concludes that the government and labor maintain a strong commitment to see that foreign investment does not have a negative impact on the rights of workers. The unions, recognizing the benefits for the country (and themselves), have responded with acceptance but also with vigilance. Finally, she reminds us that the goal of present economic strategy is the recovery and growth of state enterprises, not expansion of the foreign sector.

The works briefly reviewed above comprise a valuable trio for anyone who would evaluate today's Cuba. The two on unions and workers contain crucial information and expert insight into the current situation of Cuban labor. If the Cuban economy is going to continue to recover, it must prove efficient and, increasingly, competitive as the country turns outwards. This can only happen through labor-management cooperation. Judging from these recent writings, this is happening, although not without problems and perils. The WOLA booklet addresses the other great incognito in the equation: the US stance towards Cuba. The blockade cannot last forever due to its increasing unpopularity among all sectors of society, including some of the President's supporters particularly in mid-Western farm states. There is little doubt that the policy is anachronistic and short-sighted, even from the vantage-point of those who would change the Cuban system. Given the gigantic backward step that rationality in foreign and domestic policy has suffered in the past half year, however, the blockade's demise does not seem imminent.

Hobart Spalding
Professor Emeritus
Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY

The reviewer thanks participants in the Spring 2002 global cities seminar at the University of Pittsburgh for their discussion of this book.