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Book Reviews

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004)

It is hard to overstate the brilliance of this remarkable book, which contests the traditional Marxist view of the “transition” from feudalism to mercantile capitalism as a bloody but progressive revolution. Instead, Silvia Federici sees the transition as an apocalyptic counterrevolution, with the crushing of female power at its very core. A longtime activist and Professor Emerita of International Studies and Political Philosophy at Hofstra University, Federici has rethought the history of the rise of capitalism as a world system, drawing on an impressive range of scholarship in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. Her goal is to show that Marx’s account of primitive accumulation is flawed by his failure to see that, in addition to the expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, the enslavement of Africans, and the near-annihilation of Native Americans in the colonial quest for gold and silver,

[t]his process required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the “witches.” (63)

In her analysis, Caliban, Shakespeare’s monster from The Tempest (1612), who eloquently laments the stealing of his land by Europeans, refers to the Native Americans and Africans enslaved and subjugated by the colonizing powers of Europe. The witch refers to the great witch-hunts of the early modern period; and the body refers to the ideological transformation wrought by philosophers – chiefly Descartes and Hobbes – to render the human body available for waged work. Federici calls this complex and ambitious work a “sketch,” and freely acknowledges the hypothetical nature of the interpretation, pointing to the need for further research.¹

This book distills her thinking over more than 25 years, from the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s, through her several years of teaching in Nigeria in the 1980s during the onslaught of structural adjustment programs, to her current work as an active member of the anti-globalization movement. The book proceeds from the global justice perspective, which sees the present-day expansion of corporate interests as a new enclosure of the commons, eliminating communal land tenure in Africa as it was eliminated in England.

In chapter 1, Federici lays the groundwork for her analysis in a vivid rewriting of the history of medieval Europe, looking at peasant rebellions and heretical sects as contesting the feudal system virtually from its origins. She notes the important role of women in the millenarian and heretical sects of the 12th and 13th centuries, and calls the heretics (such as the Cathars) a social movement, creating “liberation theology for the medieval proletariat” (35). They assail the corruption of the Church and the impoverishment of the poorest peasants, as the revival of trade and the growth of the cities begins to chip away at the feudal order, and labor services are being commuted to rents and taxes.

She traces the struggles of peasants and artisans against bishops, nobility, merchants and the powerful craft masters throughout the 14th century. With the Black Death of 1347-1352 destroying more than a third of the entire population, peasants are able to obtain their own land. By the end of the 14th century the refusal of feudal rents and services is widespread. After a series of fierce peasant wars in Spain, Germany, France and Italy, the 15th century inaugurates a period of unprecedented peasant power: high wages, the disappearance of land bondage, and a drastic reduction in the wage differential by sex.

In response, the new ruling elites launch a counterrevolution. The feudal economy is no longer viable, and the new high-wage regime creates a crisis for landowners and merchants. With the attempt to restore serfdom a failure except in Eastern Europe, ruling elites begin to carry out the measures that will inaugurate the new mode of production: expropriation of the peasantry from their land, and the creation of a waged proletariat.

Chapter 2 traces this process of what Federici, with her refreshingly present-minded writing, calls land privatization –- through enclosures, evicting the tenants, rent increases, confiscation of Church land by Reformation princes, and a massive land-grab by gentry and yeoman freeholders. In England, the open-field system with its crucial availability of common land (the commons) is replaced by hedged-in fields where, in Thomas More’s famous words, sheep “eat up and swallow the very men themselves” (from Utopia, 1516; cit.122). The outcome is the transformation of the landless peasants into vagabonds who provoke the creation of poorhouses and extreme punishments for vagrancy. Federici contests the contemporary arguments of the “modernizers” of that time, that the enclosures boosted agricultural efficiency.

For workers they inaugurated two centuries of starvation, in the same way as today, even in the most fertile areas of African, Asia, and Latin America, malnutrition is rampant due to the destruction of communal land-tenure and the “export or perish” policy imposed by the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs. (102).

The Price Revolution of 1501-1650 intensifies the suffering of the peasantry. A growing percentage of the population must buy their food, with the rise of a national and international market system importing and exporting agricultural products. Food costs increase eightfold, while wages increase threefold. In the 14th century women received half of a man’s pay; by the 16th century they receive one-third. If the peasant struggle of the 14th and 15th centuries was about liberty, says Federici, that of the 16th and 17th centuries is about hunger. Food riots -– often led by women –- are common.

As capitalist relations spread we see continuous popular rebellion. In response, the ruling elites launch an attack on all forms of collective solidarity. No more processions to bless the fields; no more dances around the Maypole. Especially under the Puritans following the English Civil War, a process of “social enclosure” takes place, with churches withdrawing the customary public space for harvest festivals, while supporting a new ideology exalting marriage and the private home. Meanwhile a system of public assistance is put into place, and the international debate over the “deserving” poor begins. Federici sees the rise of census-taking, charting births and deaths, and calculating the number of the poor, as a giant leap by state authorities into the management of social reproduction, and indeed as establishing the role of the state as the guarantor of class relations.

From the 1580s to the 1630s we see the onset of severe population decline. Markets shrink, trade stops: this is the first international economic crisis. The new leaders of mercantile capitalism agree that the number of citizens determine a nation’s wealth. A fanatical desire to replenish the population –- expressed by writers like Jean Bodin -- is reflected in new policies. Infanticide becomes a capital offense. Pregnancies must be registered with the authorities. Marriage is encouraged, and illegitimacy is criminalized. More women are executed for infanticide in 16th- and 17th -century Europe than for any other crime except witchcraft. Midwives are enlisted as spies for the authorities, and doctors begin to replace them in the birthing room, as they are suspected of infanticide.

At the same time that women are being deprived of their traditional means of contraception and abortion – in short, their reproductive autonomy –- they are losing their role as workers. The assumption is gaining ground that women should not be working outside the home. Female work is being redefined as housekeeping. Craft workers begin to exclude women from the late 15th century, and those who fail to comply are labeled shrews, whores, and witches. A wave of misogyny focuses on the disobedient wife, and the ground is laid for what Federici terms “the patriarchy of the wage.”
           
Chapter 3 lays out the philosophical underpinnings of the attempt to transform the unruly peasantry into a disciplined, wage-earning workforce. Federici’s premise here is that in the early modern period, large numbers of people despised the wage and preferred to become vagabonds. This provokes a “regime of terror,” intensifying penalties for crimes against property, the so-called bloody laws, “intended to bind workers to the jobs imposed on them” (135). But this is accompanied by a “radical transformation of the person” (137). As part of this “vast process of social engineering” (137), we see the development of a new sense of the relationship between mind and body. Here Federici interprets Hobbes, Descartes, and the other developers of Mechanical Philosophy as the creators of a “new bourgeois spirit that calculates, classifies, makes distinctions, and degrades the body” (139) into an inert, mechanical entity that can be devoted to the work process. The medieval concept of the body as a “receptacle of magical powers” gives way to a view of the body as a machine.

It is in chapter 4, in her account of the witch-hunts, that Federici lays out the heart of her thesis. The persecution and terrorizing of poor women, and the consequent transformation of gender ideology, are a crucial element in the destruction of solidarity of the European peasantry. This is the most strikingly original part of her re-interpretation of primitive accumulation. Why did the persecution of witches arise, spread to all parts of Europe and the New World, and then gradually fade away? Why did the authorities encourage and organize the torture and burning of witches? Federici argues that contrary to the interpretation of most historians, the witch-hunts were not the last flare-up of medievalism in a modernizing Europe, but rather, an integral part of the rise of mercantile capitalism. Her interpretation here is comparable to recent work on the epoch of plantation slavery in the New World, showing this not as a throwback to feudalism, but as the first moment of disciplined commodity production for the world market.

Following Maria Mies, Federici shows us that witch-burning, which she compares to the 21st-century “war on terrorism,” was a politically organized campaign, seeking to crush the spirit of peasant women. Women had been leaders of peasant rebellions; their collective knowledge as midwives and healers had been part of a cohesive peasant culture based in the world of the commons, and infused with a comfortable belief in magic as part of a traditional relationship to nature. Women impoverished by enclosures, who had lost their economic security with the end of the open field system, and who were forced into stealing and begging, were the targets of this campaign, as were the midwives and healers whose traditional roles included what we would now classify as obstetrics, general medicine, and psychotherapy.

By mobilizing misogyny (the hatred and contempt for women), the authorities of the day succeeded in pitting men against women. In this transformation, men were complicit: only one documented case has been found of men defending their wives against a witch round-up. As a result the concept of womanhood was turned upside down. The economically productive women of the late Middle Ages will now be subjected to the authority of husbands, and their economically productive role erased. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, with her open and bawdy sexuality, who boasted of burying five husbands and being ready to take a sixth in her old age, will be replaced by the chastened and submissive Kate in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (1593), laying the groundwork for the Victorian ideal of the angel in the home.

The definition of women as demonic beings, and the atrocious and humiliating practices to which so many of them were subjected, left indelible marks in the collective female psyche and in women’s sense of possibilities. From every viewpoint -– socially, economically, culturally, politically -– the witch-hunt was a turning point in women’s lives; it was the equivalent of the historic defeat to which Engels alludes, in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), as the cause of the downfall of the matriarchal world. (102f)

Finally, in chapter 5, Federici draws the links between the events in Europe and those in the New World. This is the least developed of her chapters, exploring the demonization and torture of Native Americans, and the links of this process of cultural destruction to the ideology that tortured witches. She concludes by pointing to the parallels with contemporary globalization, noting that witch-hunts have reappeared in contemporary Africa and Latin America.

[i]f we apply to the present the lessons of the past, we realize that the reappearance of witch-hunting in so many parts of the world in the 80s and 90s is a clear sign of a process of “primitive accumulation,” which means that the privatization of land and other communal resources, mass impoverishment, plunder, and the sowing of divisions in once-cohesive communities are again on the world agenda. “If things continue this way” –- the elders in a Senegalese village commented to an American anthropologist, expressing their fears for the future – “our children will eat each other.” (239)

There are many points to argue with in this book. The thematic structure requires the reader to go back and forth through the centuries more than once. The interrelations of the events in the New World and the Old are only sketched in, although Federici convincingly cites recent research on how the treatment of the Native Americans and that of the European peasantry, particularly women, formed a kind of feedback loop, with characterizations of witchcraft accompanying the persecution of native women, and visual imagery of cannibalism from the New World being re-imported to Europe. The striking woodcut illustrations of the text bring her arguments to life.

More crucially, one might argue that the view presented of capitalism as a world-system is one-sided. As noted, Federici is rigorously opposed to Marx’s view that the arrival of capitalism was overall a progressive development, since it was based fundamentally on the devaluation and persecution of women, Africans, and Native Americans. She tends to idealize the solidarity of collective rural life, overlooking the impact of ancient superstition and prejudice. This perspective rules out any appreciation of the advances in economic productivity, science and technology that would lay the foundations, inter alia, for the renewed feminist movement of the 1970s.
           
None of this, however, diminishes the enormous significance of this work, which powerfully mobilizes the insights of feminist organizing and research to reveal the dangerous blindspots in patriarchal social theory. As Peter Linebaugh has written,

[t]he burning of the witches… was essential to capitalist work-discipline. This is what Marx called the alienation of the body, what Max Weber called the reform of the body, what Norman O. Brown called the repression of the body, and what Foucault calls the discipline of the body. Yet, these social theorists of deep modernization overlooked the witch hunt! (“Chapter 39, Order 39: Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq,” www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh1127004.html)

Caliban is a model of Marxist-feminist work, demonstrating the crucial relevance of gender and race issues to the class struggles of the past, present, and future. It should be required reading for Marxists of all persuasions.

Review by Hester Eisenstein
Sociology, Queens College and
The Graduate Center, CUNY
hester1@prodigy.net

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2005).

What makes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz so compelling, both as a person and as a writer, is that she cannot function without seeing the entire canvas of anti-imperialism. Roxanne is not a one-issue person; she is a vital, dialectical thinker. Over thirty-five years ago when Roxanne and I first met in the heady days of the incipient Women’s Movement, we solidly agreed on the need to keep the goal of fundamental social change in sight. Over the decades, that commitment to the big picture never wavered. In Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, Roxanne applies her sharp analytical apparatus to Central America and the Indigenous Movement, but never abandons the resolute feminism and relentless honesty of the early years. She is as frank, fearless and calmly confident in 2006 as she was in 1970 when we struggled for female liberation together.

Blood on the Border is the third volume of a powerful trilogy of memoirs by this activist-scholar. First came Red Dirt: Growing up Okie (Verso 1997), the story of the author’s political and personal formation in rural Oklahoma; then Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 (City Lights Books 2001), the narration of her participation in the Women’s and Anti-War Movements. And finally, we are treated to this latest work that focuses on the role of marginalized indigenous peoples in bringing about social change, and Dunbar-Ortiz’s part in that struggle. The vision that links the three volumes is the author’s determination to dissect and contest the US national origin myth. She defines this myth in Outlaw Woman: “…a matrix of stories that justify conquest and settlement, transforming the white settlers into an indigenous people who believe they are the true natives of the continent”(57f).

In the first decade of the 21st century, some of the most significant social movements in Latin America have arisen among indigenous peoples; in places like Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, they are challenging both US power and the ruling elites of their own countries. Roxanne’s saga of the Contra war gives us invaluable tools for understanding the opposing forces in this current confrontation. 

Her memoir blends first-hand observation, astute political and historical analysis, and relentless personal honesty to produce a compelling historical/literary text. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts her role in the Central American drama that unfolded between 1979 -– when the Sandinista National Liberation Front brought about the collapse of Somoza regime –- and the ousting of the Sandinistas from power in the 1990 elections. She also uncovers unexamined aspects of the US intervention in Nicaragua; a central aspect of her story is an eyewitness account of how the Miskitu people of Nicaragua were used by the United States as tools in its wars against the Sandinistas.

Following the Sandinista victory in 1979, the Miskitu, Sumu and Rama indigenous peoples formed MISURASATA and demanded Sandinista acknowledgment and support for their self-determination, starting with including the indigenous languages in the popular literacy campaign. Although the Sandinistas agreed to a literacy program in indigenous languages, they balked at indigenous sovereignty. As Dunbar-Ortiz explains, the relationship between the Spanish-speaking (almost wholly non-indigenous) Sandinistas of Western Nicaragua and the non-Spanish-speaking indigenous peoples of Eastern Nicaragua was historically complex and fraught with difficulties –- difficulties adroitly manipulated by US policymakers to pit indigenous peoples against the Sandinistas. For 500 years, leaders in the Americas have insisted that tolerating indigenous cultures and societies would undermine the nation-state. However, in recent years the centuries-old relations between states and indigenous peoples have started to reverse themselves with new attention given to the reality of multiethnic states. Blood on the Border is an important contribution to this dialogue.

The book covers the period 1974 to 1988, encompassing the author’s decade-long involvement with the Sandinista revolution. After years of intense, full-time activities in the Women’s Movement and anti-imperialist campaigns, Dunbar-Ortiz (whose maternal lineage is in part Native American) joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) after the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973. Her prologue offers highlights from the first two volumes of memoirs and an insightful analysis of the breakdown of the student movement of the sixties and early seventies. Blood on the Border organizes a wealth of unknown or little-known information on the Contra War and its official and unofficial protagonists in North and Central America.

Weaving in and out of the fluidly written narrative is the account of the author’s bouts with alcoholism, failed personal relationships, evocations of early years in rural Oklahoma, and clashes with the Left. In her ongoing struggle to ensure the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua self-determination within the Sandinista revolution, we accompany Dunbar-Ortiz on many trips to Nicaragua to dialogue with Sandinistas; to Tegucigalpa and the office of John Negroponte (then US Ambassador to Honduras); through almost impenetrable Miskitu villages in Eastern Nicaragua; to near-death on a sabotaged plane; and on missions to Mexico and Geneva working with the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Non-Aligned Movement in support of indigenous peoples – with some significant victories. We witness, in 1982, the formation of her friendship with future Nobel Peace Prize winner Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú.

Dunbar-Ortiz’s method is economical and effective. She creates detailed snapshots that depict cultural and social factors together with the political economy of any given historical or current situation; into this background are introduced specific players, and their motivations and actions, including the author herself. In this way, one comes to understand many events in depth, and often from new perspectives. To cite but a few examples: we learn what the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the Sioux and the US government really signified (24f); why and how the Atlantic Coast of Central America became the original foothold of US imperialism overseas (140f); and what the unique role of Moravian missionaries was in Miskitia (107f).

 One of the most gripping cases of historical exposé is the chapter entitled “Red Christmas.” “Operation Red Christmas,” so named by the CIA in December 1981, was the opening maneuver of the US-organized and -financed Contra war to oust the Sandinistas. Not many people knew about it at the time, and little of the reportage and history then or since has identified Red Christmas as the beginning of the Contra war. Dunbar-Ortiz knew about it only because she was there.  She gives an extraordinary account of the role of CIA-trained guerrillas who attacked Sandinista forces along the Rio Coco in northeastern Nicaragua at Christmas time in 1981. Most of the guerrillas were Miskitu who, after listening to Moravian and Contra propaganda, actually believed that the Sandinistas planned to incarcerate them in Cuban concentration camps while Cuban settlers would come and colonize their land. The Contra strategy was to keep the Sandinistas busy putting down a CIA-created Miskitu rebellion, so that they would be unable to defend Managua (the capital city located in the West) from attacks from the north and south. The CIA’s other objective, Dunbar-Ortiz recounts, was to place civilians, Miskitus, into the crossfire so that the US could accuse the Sandinistas of massacring the Indians.

The final chapter and epilogue cover the Sandinistas’ ouster from power in the 1990 elections and the collapse of the socialist bloc, and bring us up to 2003. “Nicaragua,” the author concludes, “was the last great hope for national liberation movements to succeed in breaking free from imperialism. That window of opportunity for national-democratic transitions from Western colonialism and imperialism has closed. More than that, the nation-state as such has failed to make a transition to peaceful international relations.” The dream of peace among nation-states does not appear possible, as the United Nations can do nothing against US wishes; indigenous movements are therefore “ever more fundamental to humanity in reaching a different conclusion than a nuclear war or environmental disaster” (303f).  This is a big statement and an urgent topic at the beginning of the 21st century. I hope we hear more on it from this seasoned veteran with proven credentials.

Blood on the Border is a first-rate testimonial -- it is also testimony to the value of merging personal commitment with socio-political analysis. In addition, it is a significant part of an ongoing reevaluation of the revolutionary decades 1960-1980, and a major contribution to understanding the increasing global role of indigenous peoples in social change. Best of all, it’s a great read.

Review by Roberta L. Salper
Boston University
robertasalper@yahoo.com

Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).

“Understanding Hugo Chávez” might have been a more appropriate title for this extensive interview conducted by the veteran Marxist writer, Marta Harnecker, with Venezuela’s Chávez. Harnecker’s pertinent interviewing -- or perhaps just the presence of a tape recorder -- allows Chávez to draw a fascinating personal and political portrait of himself. She interviews Chávez “from the left,” and in some instances the questions read like an oral exam (on which Chávez gets an A+). Fortunately, Chávez doesn’t treat it that way and feels free to (respectfully) roam as far as he likes from the questioning, demonstrating why he has become one of the most interesting Latin American political figures of recent times.

The title of the book, however, is misleading in two ways: first it implies that Chávez is the Revolution, or, more modestly, that the Revolution exists, first and foremost, in the form of his plans, perspectives and perceptions. But the complicated Venezuelan political process has not been the work of one man, important and dominant as he may be. His thoughts on the process are hardly the last word -- or at least let’s hope that things don’t get to that stage.

Second, the title is misleading because the book was published in mid-2005, though the interviews took place over a few days in July 2002. In the ensuing three years, the process has undergone some profound changes that are missing from the interviews. Some of these changes are mentioned in a sketchy “chronology” at the front of the book, but the long interview itself, as a tool for understanding the revolutionary process in Venezuela, while useful, is critically out of date.

At one point, for example, Chávez, responding to Harnecker’s comment about his cautious foreign policy, tells her, “Now, maybe if you told me that the global context, or at least the regional context began to change, and that a large group of countries began to move toward a position that allowed us more strength and flexibility, things would be different.” But that’s precisely what has happened in the time between the interviews and the book’s publication, making his comment all the more prophetic. The process was a good deal more tentative in 2002.

But whatever its shortcomings as a snapshot of the Venezuelan Revolution, the book gives us an intriguing glimpse of Chávez’s narrative skills and his ability to articulate recent Venezuelan political history, his role in redirecting the flow of that history, and the ongoing dilemmas of the Chavista political moment.

His narrative skills are most apparent in his vivid, personal recounting of the three days in April 2002 in which he was taken prisoner, thought he would be killed, slowly realized the tide was turning in his favor, and emerged triumphant when key sectors of the armed forces disowned the coup after hundreds of thousands of his supporters streamed into the streets. The book is worth reading if only for that briefly, though masterfully told piece of history.

We also get a strong sense of Chávez’s self-image as a military man who has learned how to “direct groups of human beings… lifting their self esteem, their morale.” One of his great accomplishments, we know, has been to lift the self esteem of millions of previously excluded citizens. He tells Harnecker he believes “in natural leaders but not those who are imposed,” classifying himself, of course, among the former.

But, there is, we hardly need to be told, a dangerous potential downside to this kind of personalism. “There are people who go along with you through one phase,” he tells Harnecker, “but who later fall behind for any number of reasons. …[A]s the process demands more, it requires people with a higher consciousness, capacity, strength, force.” But who gets to define “higher consciousness” here? Does the expression of political doubts or disagreements always constitute “falling behind”? Is “higher consciousness” to be found in the sacred texts of revolutionary struggle (as Harnecker’s questions imply, suggesting another danger to democratic processes of change), or in the guidance of a “natural leader” (as Chávez’s narrative implies)?

Chávez talks about the complexities of state power and the steep learning curve of his early years in power: “We created a map of the state to note the different institutions and the people who controlled them, but institutions keep appearing [along with] the vices and habits of their particular public functionaries.” It is no secret that, for all its revolutionary militancy, the Chavista government has yet to master the arts of efficient management or to conquer Venezuela’s hereditary corruption. Chávez says this about corruption: “The new must be constructed on the ruins of the old, and that is where the bad habits hold you back… That is why we have not been able to eliminate the scourge of corruption.” (But from the vantage point of three years later, we know that some high-level Chavistas have recently been implicated in serious corruption, and that many have military connections. Chávez’s understandable reluctance to challenge his supporters in the military is broached in an abstract way by Harnecker (i.e. relying on the military is always dangerous) but it has become concrete in current debates about corruption and mismanagement.

He also talks about the possibilities of reforming capitalism. He states clearly what has become evident over the past three years, that even as the Revolution has radicalized and become militantly anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist, it has not become anti-capitalist. “[W]ith a government like this one,” he tells Harnecker, “with a constitution like ours, with a people who have awakened like ours have, with a balance of power like the one we have, it is indeed possible to humanize capitalism… We are trying to move slowly but surely toward an economic alternative to dehumanized capitalism.”

Perhaps in that regard, it’s the lack of a hegemonic revolutionary party that bothers Harnecker. As for Chávez, he insists that there is no hegemonic party because his government is not sectarian: “If someone were to analyze the composition of the cabinets that have been in place over the course of my government, they would realize that the majority are not members of the MVR party.” How this duality of “natural leader” and revolutionary party plays itself out over the coming years will be interesting to watch.

Chávez’s push for regional integration and his inclusive mobilization of Venezuela’s popular classes are nicely captured in the book, but since the interviews (and the dramatic defeat of the April 2002 coup), the revolution has strengthened and consolidated itself in a number of ways. First came the defeat of the general strike called by the managers of the state oil company, PDVSA, at the end of 2002 and the subsequent bringing of the nationalized but independent oil company under firm government control. Second came the creation, beginning in 2003, of the “missions,” a set of new institutions that work alongside, or bypass, established state institutions to foster greater security, inclusion, and access to services among low-income Venezuelans. Third was the mandate given to the Chavista government by the overwhelming defeat of the Recall Referendum in August, 2004. Fourth was a genuine attempt to begin land reform in early 2005. Fifth have been the ongoing oil-barter deals that have strengthened Venezuela’s presence in the Hemisphere.

But at the end of the day, Chávez’s greatest accomplishment may have been the creation of a new sense of citizenship in Venezuela. He articulates this eloquently: “More than being [already] a people, we were a collection of human beings, but then, as a result of the historical process that our country has undergone over the last few decades, a people has been formed.” He is talking about the inclusion of the excluded, the reconstitution of citizenship.

Review by Fred Rosen
North American Congress on Latin America
frosen144@hotmail.com

Walter A. Davis, Death’s Dream Kingdom (London: Pluto Press, 2006)

The most important contribution of this important and wide-ranging book is its re-definition of ideology: Davis argues that ideology is not so much a matter of what you believe as why you believe it. Ideology is not just -- or not even primarily –- about distorting reality or about purveying a version of reality that serves ruling-class interests and/or reproduces the mode of production (although it of course does those things as well): ideology is about satisfying deep-seated psychological needs that remain for most people completely unconscious. Death’s Dream Kingdom thus consolidates an approach to ideology first presented in Deracination (reviewed in this journal, 19:1 [2005]), where it exposed the unconscious motives for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, it is extended to more contemporary material, including most dramatically Mel Gibson’s wildly popular, sado-masochistic sacred-snuff movie, the torture fiasco at the Abu Ghraib prison, the ecocidal use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush regime’s reaction to and exploitation of the trauma of 9/11. The choice of these particular recent events may appear extreme, but Davis’s psychoanalytically-informed theory of ideology is radical enough to do them justice, and to show that they are but the most remarkable tip of a much larger iceberg.

Any and all ideology, on this argument, involves the mobilization of fantasy to construe potentially traumatic historical events so that they merely reconfirm the reigning myths or “guarantees” through which society prefers to think about itself. What is distinctive about ideology in traumatized America today, Davis shows, is that it is “borderline psychotic” in its structure and dynamics. So, compared with its earlier Marxist incarnations, ideology critique today has a new task:

Karl Marx, at a far more innocent time in history, saw the task of philosophy as one of extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell of Hegelianism. That kernel was the proletariat and the materialist understanding of History the new guarantee. Living at a later stage of things, shorn of all guarantees, we face a far different task: to extract the psychotic kernel from the fantasmatic shell.

The cogency of such a radical, depth-psychological version of ideology critique thus hinges on demonstrating how the collective American psyche has become so disjointed in its structure, so unbalanced in its dynamics, so divorced from reality as to be deemed very nearly psychotic.

Although concrete examples of such collective psychosis appear throughout the book, its kernel is presented through the four features of fundamentalism catalogued by Charles Strozier in Apocalypse (Boston, 1994); in Davis’s account, these features become the stages of development of the fundamentalist psychosis. The starting point is a psyche unable to handle complexity, nuance, contradiction: it relies instead on a literal reading of an absolutely authoritative text. Real human life, of course, is not that simplistic, so the next stage – conversion – requires that the fundamentalist psyche split off from itself any “sinful” desires or behaviors, cleaving instead to an idealized self in thrall to the super-ego and that would thus become worthy of salvation. The conversion experience is supposed to commemorate and consolidate the split; instead, the fragmented psyche must engage in repeated and desperate attempts to maintain the idealized self against the threats and temptations of desire. Being unreliable and unstable itself, the psyche must look outward to others for such continuing confirmation of this ideal self. Relations with others thus take three forms: in-group consorting with other converts to shore up the idealized sense of self; repeated attempts to convert others (evangelical proselytizing) who would thereby validate the ideal; brutal punishment of anyone who doesn’t conform to the ideal and thus reminds the convert of all the desires he has split off and repressed. The inevitable and continual return of the repressed fuels a vindictive rage devoted to repeatedly punishing in others the parts of human being that the convert wishes to have banished from himself forever: this is the process of punitive projective identification Davis had already identified in the atomic bombing of Japanese civilians in 1945. The fundamentalist dynamic is here taken one last, harrowing step farther: since the offending split-off elements can never be completely removed (internally or externally), the final solution is to end it all: to attain a complete and ultimate purification by destroying everything, confident in the apocalyptic delusion that the righteous self will be saved by an all-powerful super-ego figure after all.

The resulting personality -– grandiose borderline narcissist -– is so hollowed out by repressing everything human in the service of an insatiable super-ego, that it can only experience satisfaction by staging repeated victories over others whom it dismisses with contempt as soon as they have served the purpose of shoring up the narcissistic sense of self. Voracious consumption and accumulation of commodities serve much the same function, as “capitalist ideology fuses economic and psychological imperatives. The pursuit of narcissistic ‘identity’ and the fetishization of commodities are inseparable and finally indistinguishable processes.” And for Davis ideology-critique must be able not only to identify the psychotic processes at work in the collective psyche, but also to provide an alternative approach to the trauma of historical events that would lead to more adequate responses. Davis contrasts his approach with those of Robert Jay Lifton and Slavoj Zizek. Instead of falling back on the humanistic guarantees (Lifton) that history continues to prove wrong, and instead of reciting the mantra of a Real that remains completely abstract from history (Zizek), Davis insists on dwelling in the anxiety of trauma and using it to do tragic battle with the super-ego. Two concrete analyses are particularly important here. One is a brilliant debunking of Kant’s claim to have developed a rational ethics, for Davis shows that Kant’s entire ethical system hinges on an emotional -– and ultimately irrational -– relation of reverence toward the law (i.e. the super-ego). The other is an illuminating comparison between Pat Tillman and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whereby the former “tragically” sacrifices his life while naively obeying (and hence reinforcing) the imperatives of the super-ego (he gives up family and football stardom to serve in Bush’s army), while the latter refuses the commands of the super-ego (Claudius) and tragically struggles instead to find a new sense of himself and his position in the rotten state of Denmark.

My only disagreement with this important book concerns the source of the psychosis whose expressions Davis so brilliantly anatomizes. I am in complete agreement that all effective ideology “fuses economic [or social] and psychological imperatives”: the question is, which imperative comes first? Where do psychological imperatives come from? Davis’s existential-psychoanalytic framework -– along with his searing accounts of the ways abusive family relationships and religion can foster borderline psychotic proclivities in children -– predispose him to privilege the psychological register. Hence he will suggest that “One does not become a Nazi only when circumstances call for such beings. The grounds for that choice are prepared long before. One has already become a Nazi in one’s heart. And it is there that the disorder sits awaiting the circumstances that provide the objective correlative of what is an inner condition.” But not everyone is from infancy a Nazi at heart just waiting for objective circumstances to bring their disorder to realization; as widespread as the familial and religious abuse of children unfortunately is, the excessive cruelty and humiliation he describes are not everyone’s universal fate, even if every infant does have to negotiate somehow the prolonged period of dependence characteristic of human being. In this connection, the Freudian concept of nachtraglichkeit or ‘deferred action’ suggests a somewhat different explanation: rather than conceiving of a specific infantile disorder as simply awaiting circumstances to realize it, Freud insists that childhood experience only becomes meaningful in relation to later circumstances; this suggests that it would be e.g. Nazism – or capitalist consumerism -– that enables the trauma of infantile dependency on all-powerful caregivers as one infantile complex among many to take center stage later in social life, when specific circumstances require or encourage it. Thus it would be the separation-anxiety over the loss of one’s job (which in adult life means losing access to means of life supplied by the market) that would make the earlier separation-anxiety over the loss of parental love (which in infancy means losing access to means of life supplied by parents or care-givers) into a trauma, regardless of how harshly or tenderly that relationship was experienced in infancy.

This difference may appear slight, but it puts radical social change back on par with the kind of radical personal change Davis advocates so persuasively. In any case, it is the fusion of social and psychological imperatives that is important to recognize, for it is this that renders desperately needed social change all the more difficult to achieve. For what we’re faced with is not just a political conspiracy, it’s a psycho-pathology. As Davis says, quoting Marx, the root of the problem is man; and as Marx also said, the problem is that the educator himself needs to be educated.

Review by Eugene W. Holland
Ohio State University
holland1@osu.edu

Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kiernan Walsh Taylor, eds, American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2004).

Anticommunism played a pivotal role for the US labor movement in the Cold War. This collection of new essays focuses on the individual and social actions of labor union members as they shaped and were shaped by the politico-economic trends of the post-WWII era. Then as now, themes of national and racial identity loomed large in the class society that is America.

In her essay, Ellen Schrecker focuses on the “institutional fallout” of McCarthyism’s attack on left-led labor by the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the federal government. Labor unions, divided by the domestic crusade of anticommunism, were unable to prevent passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), which strengthened US financial and industrial wealth.  Schrecker shows, convincingly, how and why after World War II mass labor organizations relinquished popular power to an illusory concept of patriotism that expanded state and private power. That process greatly weakened the social momentum of racial minorities and independent unions: “The destruction of these unions transformed the nascent drive for racial equality into a more middle-class movement, one whose leaders fought for legal and political rights but ignored the economic problems that plagued most Southern blacks.” The political triumph of the pro-business Democratic Party played no small part in this process that expanded the private property of the ownership class. 

Workers at General Electric plants in Schenectady, New York, are the special focus in Gerald Zahavi’s essay. His interviews of former workers help readers to appreciate the city’s “uncivil” labor conflict during the 1940s and 1950s. Local 301 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), bolstered by the Communist Party, clashed with the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE). The IUE was created by the CIO after it expelled Local 301 and the UE. The autobiographical narratives of the men and women involved make clear the alliances forged and fractured at the “point of production.” These workers and their families wrestled with work, wages, the Catholic Church, strikes, gender, skin color, public hearings and child-rearing against the backdrop of a frenzied anticommunism. What emerges is a complex view of labor during a time of political turmoil. Marx’s view that people make their own history in circumstances not entirely of their own choosing puts this particular tumult into sharper focus.

An essay by Don Watson probes labor anticommunism, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the California agricultural sector between 1954 and 1961. Although the postwar quickly became a Cold War against domestic dissidents, “the UPWA, led by non-Communist officers, continued to allow Communists, a minority group, to participate in union affairs,” Watson writes. Meanwhile, the mechanization of agriculture and super-exploitation of Mexican nationals set the stage for the UPWA’s plan to organize California farm workers for higher wages and better living standards. Yet cooperative mobilization with the National Agricultural Workers Union was not to be, due partly to red-baiting of the UPWA. Two officials with the NAWU led this charge. Church, government, and other union leaders also participated in the undermining of agricultural organizing efforts by the UPWA. To this day, California’s farmworkers work for long hours and low pay. Crucially, their increased productivity remains central to the US economy after the end of the Cold War.  By keeping these workers’ wages low, agribusiness lowers the price of food. This enables employers to also reduce the wages of non-agricultural workers.
 
Randi Storch analyzes the evolution of the UPWA and the Communist Party in Chicago away from multi-racial unionism after World War II. One of the factors he clarifies is the changing composition of the stockyard workforce in the city. During the Second World War era, the party had privileged the defeat of fascism over interracial coalitions for black justice in a racist US society. Between World Wars I and II, white Communists in the city’s trade union movement had militantly backed black-white labor coalitions to improve the living and working conditions of African Americans. In the postwar years, white suburban sprawl grew, as whites gained subsidies from the federal government through the Home Owners Loan Corporations and the Federal Housing Authority. Moreover, white workers, in Storch’s view, saw the CP/UPWA emphasis on black rights as partly causing the Cold War red-hunting.  Meanwhile, theoretical criticism in a party publication of whites’ substandard treatment of blacks had the unintended effect of widening racial divisions among UPWA members. It is perhaps charitable to note that the ending of such racial divisions remains a dream. Case in point is the radically different views of whites and blacks on the federal government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.  

David Palmer’s essay concerns independent labor activism in the East Coast shipyards in anti-fascist and (later) anticommunist movements. His research highlights how a lively left within the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) influenced, and was influenced by, occupational and political coalitions driven by capitalist downturns and upturns before and during World War II. One force that mobilized radical workers was the fight for racial equality on the job: “Independent leftists, perhaps best characterized as anarcho-syndicalists, sought to bridge the gap between the majority of white workers who identified with New Deal politics… and a minority who identified with the Communist Party, including many black and Hispanic workers.” Then as now, fighting the color line is battling the class system.  Appeals to patriotism can make this struggle a bit hard to see, a motivating factor for the war-making class.   

Kenneth Burt analyzes union politics on the West Coast within what he terms “the liberal left.”  With a keen eye for the cultural or subjective dimension of organized labor, his essay sheds light on the role of local forces that determined a 1952 union election of electrical workers at a Standard Coil plant in East Los Angeles. This particular struggle at a defense plant involved an election to represent the mainly young Latina work force. On one side was the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Employees (IUE). Trying to unseat it was the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), allied with the CPUSA. Ultimately, “the convergence of political alliance and personal experiences,” centrally those of local religious leaders, helps us to grasp what determined the outcome of this labor union struggle settled prior to the arrival of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy on the national political stage. 
           
“Anticommunism proved most divisive” in Evansville, Indiana, writes Samuel W. White, focusing on that city’s tidal wave of red-hunting after the Second World War. Employees, employers, politicians and unions, spurred by Cold War ideology that conflated communism and fascism, purged the progressive UE from Evansville workplaces, where consumer durables such as refrigerators were made. An explanation for the reaction against radical organized labor there, White correctly notes, lies in unions’ retreat from social to individual goals. This retrograde change facilitated the postwar rise of nationalism and patriotism. Without an alternative vision to capitalist
accumulation and exploitation after World War II, workers’ increased material comforts weakened social cohesion built up in the 1930s. White’s Gramscian view of class struggle emphasizes the role of ideology as a means for union members to transcend US chauvinism, individualism and racism, which weaken ordinary people while empowering corporations and the government that serves these legal fictions.
           
In his essay, William Issel examines how labor in San Francisco was influenced by the Catholic Church. There, it backed a moral capitalism while opposing secular communism without resort to red-baiting. The Church supported cooperation between employees and employers, including the right of workers to go on strike, by invoking the labor encyclicals issued by Pope Leo (1891) and Pope Pius XI (1931) as bulwarks against radical politics. The Marxian view of expropriating the expropriators who own the means of production presented a concrete threat to S.F. Catholics of the employing class, Issel notes. On the educational front, Catholic labor philosophy taught by the Jesuits at the University of San Francisco competed with Marxian class analysis offered by the Communist Party-backed California Labor School. Catholic unionism thrived during the postwar era of liberal capitalism in S.F. by occupying a middle ground between anticommunism and radicalism. Issel succeeds in presenting the material and philosophical dynamics to enlarge the view of the Church as a conservative American institution willing to making the wages system appear as natural as gravity.

Vernon L. Pedersen’s essay considers two views of anticommunism from what he terms “the mix of responsible and extremist elements within the movement.” He focuses on the HUAC investigation of Communist Party activity in Maryland. There, “Anticommunism enjoyed widespread endorsement only in times of threats (real or perceived) to national security and… was not a form of ‘witch hunting’ but the manifestation of a genuine contest between ideologies.” Pedersen is limited, in my view, by his failure to analyze anticommunism as a form of false consciousness -- arising, as Marx argued, from the social form of labor under capitalism, which makes people incapable of seeing how they actively create the system that disfigures them. 
              
Margaret Miller analyzes and explains the social conditions under which progressive activists forced the Washington state government to increase welfare benefits to retirees. Organizers privileged gender and racial inclusion.  To that end, they mobilized people in social events that featured music, broadening the appeal of the Washington Pension Union. Music in general and singing in particular are communal, older than class society, and speak to something profound in people. In a society ridden with class divisions, “working-class women and African-Americans pointed the WPU in new directions,” Miller writes, detailing how both groups’ activities in the labor force changed the WPU. Meanwhile, Cold War repression contributed to setting in motion for the WPU an “isolation that was often self-imposed.” Its 1948 shift to the Progressive Party from the Democratic Party showed the limitations of US electoral politics. 

Elections are a tough nut to crack for American progressives.  This implication of Miller’s essay is relevant to the current US political straightjacket.
              
As postwar political reaction gathered steam, labor education schools run by the Communist Party on the East and West Coasts came under increasing attack by the federal government. New York City’s Jefferson School of Social Science and the San Francisco Bay Area’s California Labor School attracted a broad range of the populace. (A late friend of mine, Wayne Hultgren, attended the CLS on the G.I. Bill.) The courses, students and teachers at these radical institutions are the focus of Marvin Gettleman’s essay, “The Lost World of United States Labor Education.” Notably, the Marxian view of changing and interpreting the world shaped the culture of these party schools, including a recognition of social changes wrought by the Second World War that featured the increased labor market participation of women. In Communist education, “The main point was to sever teaching from all connection with the idea of student failure,” Gettleman writes. US public education has diverged dramatically from that egalitarian view. American society is the worse for this present-day trend that is privatizing schooling to the benefit of investors.

With “Operation Dixie, the Red Scare, and the Defeat of Southern Labor Organizing,” Michael K. Honey explains the actors and factors central to the post-World War II unionization campaign in the former slave-holding states.  Operation Dixie was the flawed CIO organizing structure that aimed to unionize the Southern textile industry. Labor organizing that began so promisingly in the US South was ultimately defeated by multiple forces, but mainly by anticommunism and white racism. Organizers, needing to confront white wage-earners’ hostility to blacks, attempted to copy the successful unionization campaigns of the Northern auto and steel industries in the 1930s. “They might have instead focused more resources on organizing in woodworking, furniture factories, food processing, and other industries where blacks made up a significant portion of the work force,” Honey writes. With blacks more open than whites in the South to joining cross-racial unions, the CIO’s strategy was a tragic limitation, given the forces arrayed against it. The absence of a strategy to confront white identity neutered Operation Dixie, and will continue to limit the US labor movement if it is not addressed openly and honestly.    

In her essay, Gigi Peterson looks at relations between US and Mexican labor activists and Washington policy makers from the mid-1930s to the Cold War era. The global capitalist economic depression that fueled the Allied battle against the Axis powers opened up a political space for cross-border alliances. In particular, the US Good Neighbor Policy created favorable conditions for Vicente Lombardo Toledano to emerge as a major leader in Mexico. Lombardo Toledano’s warm relations with some US unions combined with his support for import-substitution policies that privileged working Mexicans earned him the wrath of US officials, as representatives of the class that benefits the most from international investment. The dominance of this class can be challenged currently, as it was by Lombardo Toledano and his allies. Peterson clarifies the challenges that he and others faced in trying to liberate governments on both sides of the US-Mexican border from the corporate agenda that has created commercial pacts such as NAFTA.     
              
The contributors to this collection peel away layers of social complexity around US workers’ struggles under the shadow of World War II and the ensuing homegrown political reaction. The geopolitical and national conflict became a way for certain members of the US working class to coalesce by purging radicals -- mainly communists and socialists -- from labor unions in ways that resonate to the current era of labor demobilization against the backdrop of a supposed war against global terror. The writers reach various conclusions in their research on labor unions and on the workers whose energy defined their role amid American hysteria concerning global communism. This very useful collection of essays that link US workplaces and communities, bringing out the triumphs and tragedies of the Cold War, should be read by working people of all backgrounds as US bankruptcy courts help corporations cut the jobs and retirements of labor union members.  

Review by Seth Sandronsky
Co-editor, Because People Matter, Sacramento
ssandron@hotmail.com

Televisionary Revolution

Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage from Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia, 1985-2000 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

The revolutionary passage of Russia, 1985-2000, was not like other revolutions: there was no exploited class; there were no exploited nations in the empire;² there was no fighting for economic redistribution, and the ruling class had no economic privileges³ and did not use armed force to defend its position. Probably the passage was not revolutionary at all, but rather counterrevolutionary.
           
What were the driving forces of this passage, and what determined its outcome? For Marc Garcelon, the struggle for democracy is the core issue, internally as the abolition of party rule and externally as the independence of the former Soviet republics. He explains the course of events by the interaction among 1) activists in the democratic movement, 2) the leadership core of the principal democratic organization of 1989-91, Democratic Russia or DemRossiia, 3) Yeltsin and his counter-elite, and 4) the legislature, Soviets, congresses, and from 1994 the Duma. DemRossiia brought Yeltsin to power in Russia in 1990 and supported dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and shock therapy from 1992 on, but was then abandoned by Yeltsin, who turned to economic and political elites for sup­port in his pr­tracted struggle with the legislature. DemRossiia lost influence after the aborted coup of 19 August 1991 and disappeared after the coup of 21 September 1993, when Yeltsin disbanded the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of Peoples Deputies to the applause of western observers and acquired dictatorial powers until the new, weakened parliament -– the state Duma and the Federation Council -– convened in January 1994.

Not only property, but also government was being privati­zed, as legal and administrative institutions were replaced by perso­nal ties between powerful individuals. Garcelon describes this as a process of feudalization, in which chance plays a big role. His exposition is, regrettably, weighted down with jargon -- "As agents located in net­works negotiate fields, and the latter undergo morphologi­cal variation over time, agency appears as an ongoing process of trajectory adjustment of habitus to institu­tional arrays in fields along paths through time" (21) -- with matching diagrams. The gen­eral introduc­tion is not easy reading. Nor are the following chapters, where these favo­rite terms recur on every 3-4 pages.

Chapter 1 describes political developments during perestroika and the roots of the emerging demo­cratic movement in earlier dissident and human rights activism. Chapter 2 analyzes how the various democratic move­ments won majorities in the Moscow and Leningrad city Soviets in March 1990 and brought Yeltsin to power in the Russian Congress of Peoples Deputies, thus creating the system of dual power of Yelt­sin and Gorbachev in 1990-91, when the DemRossiia reached its zenith. Following the “Old Guard” coup of 19 Au­gust 1991 against Gorbachev (not a coup in constitutional terms, but the replacement of one member of a collective leadership), the DemRossiia leadership supported Yeltsin's ascent to power, but failed to establish itself as a political party. From 1991 to 1993 (Chapter 4), conflict arose between the democratic movement and the Yeltsin counter-elite (which was comprised of "reformers with an apparat background and academic economists enamored of monetarist economic theory" [100]), and between factions of the democratic movement over fundamental questions of shock ther­apy, privatization, independence of former union republics, and the division of power between legislature and president. The final chapter 5 describes political and economic developments in the Yeltsin years from 1993 to his sudden resignation on 31 December 1999 and the first decree of Putin on the same day granting Yeltsin and "the family" immunity.

Thus Garcelon's book is first of all a history of DemRossiia in the decisive years 1989-93, and as such it is detailed and well documented by written sources and interviews with key eye-witnesses. But the author’s perspective is too narrow to provide a coherent picture and thus an understanding of the 1985-2000 upheaval as a whole. Garcelon misses the fact that the prevailing public discourse in Russia around 1990 was not about democracy but about economic growth. The principal revolutionary vision was “a normal life,” meaning economic abundance as depicted on western television it had been in the Soviet Union for many years. Said Gorbachev in March 1986: “In short, comrades, acceleration (uskorenie) of our economic and social development is the key to all our problems, short-term and long-term, economic and social, political and ideological, domestic and foreign.”⁴ Perestroika, the anti-alcohol campaign, glasnost' and demokratizatsiia were all mostly means towards this governing end.

Why did the democratic movement succeed in the first place? Garcelon mentions the relative failure of the Soviet economy and the deteriorating geopolitical position of the USSR as important facilitating factors. Both these conditions were impressed upon the Soviet public by transnational demonstration effects (13, 71), from western television to events in Afghanistan, Central Europe, the Baltic republics, and the Caucasus. And both demoralized the CPSU, which "explicitly linked the legitimacy of its domination to the realization of consumerist expectation" (75). Party members actively took part in the democratic movement and in the private economic activities.
           
An element of material class struggle is added to the explanation, as Garcelon convincingly demonstrates that the democratic movement was largely a rebellion of spetsialisti with a higher education, headed by prominent academicians including Andrei Sakharov and Gavriil Popov, who was elected mayor of Moscow in June 1991. According to survey data compiled by Garcelon, 80% of DemRossiia activists in 1992 had a higher education as compared to 28% of the Russian population at large. The specialists probably suffered most from the pervasive hypocrisy of Soviet society and had the most to gain from freedom of speech and democracy. Although they enjoyed high esteem and some material well-being, wage differentials were much smaller than in western countries,⁵ and they considered themselves underprivileged as compared to their counterparts in the west. Thus, the specialist rebellion was a quest for more inequality, which soon materialized, but contrary to expectations it became a "self-liquidation" of the specialists (232), whose income declined and sometimes disappeared.  
           
A further important reason for the temporary success of the democratic movement should be added, namely that neither Gorba­chev nor the Emergency Committee of 19 August 1991 resorted to military violence. "But had the coup leaders... ordered the killing of unarmed demonstrators, the White House [the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet] could have been quickly stormed" (162). What Gorbachev and the “Old Guard” coup-leaders had not done, Yeltsin himself did in October 1993, when he ordered the shelling of the White House. According to police reports, 189 people were killed.⁶ Gorbachev's lack of "belligerence" is mentioned by Garcelon but not given proper emphasis. Among Soviet leaders Gorbachev was the last, but he was the first to leave office voluntarily (186). History will hopefully give him the credit that he deserves, as a humanist who never deserted his vision of socialism and democracy, whose commitment to uskorenie and economic growth did not override concern for human life, who was not corrupted by power or military force, and who became one of the great heroes of defeat.
           
However, the transition was not without casualties, as mortality increased sharply. Garcelon mentions this only in passing (222), but it deserves some elaboration. On the cautious assumption that mortality rates increased from 11 per thousand before 1990 to 14 per thousand after 1990, a rough estimate (not factoring in minor effects of changing age-structure) gives an excess mortality of 0.5 million per year or 8 million during the period from 1990 to present, solely in Russia.⁷ This approaches the victimization levels of Stalin's collectivization and terror in the whole of the Soviet Union.

Why then was the democratic movement finally defeated? The main reason given by Garcelon is that DemRossiia did not transform itself "into a democratic political party in favor of an economic revolution from above" (226). Here, not only form of government (democracy) is mentioned, but also content (economic reform, growth, distribution, etc.). The latter is not sufficiently emphasized by Garcelon. Democracy is not always a primary objective; it is often viewed more as a means towards national liberation and above all economic growth.⁸ Failure to establish a democratic party and internal divisions in the movement are also mentioned by Reddaway and Glinski.⁹ The visions of Garcelon, of Reddaway & Glinski, and of a group of eighteen prominent Russian and American economists¹⁰ look very much like Gorbachev's reform policies. These were well suited to an agenda of social-democratic economic reform, but were derailed by a combination of (a) ideologically driven mass enthusiasm for economic growth through radical system-change and (b) calculating economic and political interests in west and east.

The democratic movement was captured by gifted, intelligent and energetic people, often industrial managers and party and komsomol leaders, who had been attracted to these avenues of self-assertion, success and influence available in Soviet society. They started their entrepreneurial economic activities in the years of perestroika and were well prepared and well connected to exploit the new opportunities of shock therapy and privatization after 1992.
           
Garcelon castigates the “economistic thinking of Yeltsin advisors mesmerized by neoliberal theory, itself blind to the political side of economic equations,” and adds:

Indeed the generic, “totalistic” aspects of neoliberal theory help explain its powerful attraction to both former party-state officials and specialists disillusioned with communist ideology. In effect, one totalistic theory displaced another, without forcing a deeper revision of habitus among those who championed it. (227)

However, Yeltsin and his team were not alone in being mesmerized by western material abundance. Everybody was, not least because of transnational televised demonstration effects. Garcelon underestimates the mood of economic optimism of 1989-91.¹¹ The various plans for transforming Russia in "500 days" were taken seriously by everybody, including the IMF and the western experts, and even Gorbachev, who negotiated a compromise Union-wide 500-Day Plan with Yeltsin during the summer of 1990. Gorbachev finally abandoned the plan in November (102, 130). Warning of the upcoming shock therapy, Yeltsin declared in October 1991 that “conditions will grow worse for everybody for six months or so.”¹² They did, but not exactly for everybody.
           
The Soviet planned economy did not collapse, and the Soviet Union did not disintegrate. Both were deliberately and actively dismantled with eyes wide open, and DemRossiia leaders endorsed it all. The awakening to material reality became rude.
           
Social and economic reality is mentioned by Garcelon, but without a systematic account, of which several are available ranging from laudatory to condemnatory. Garcelon is inclined to the realistic—i.e. very pessimistic-side,¹³ although he repeats some of the usual undocumented generalizations about the Soviet economy. He dismisses the planned economy as "a sort of ideological fiction" (11), and speaks of "the shoddy social services inherited from Soviet times" (222). This needs a more explicit formulation as well as documentation, but apparently anything goes concerning the Soviet Union. Thus The Economist recently described present-day Russia as “starting to regain the ground lost under communism.”¹⁴ At least Garcelon gives a graph (208) of Russian real GDP 1987-95, and it effectively shows that the ground was lost after 1991 as a direct consequence of radical economic reform.

Now we can see the outcome of Russia's (counter)revolutionary passage: social and economic misery for large parts of the population; exorbitant inequality (class society was reconstructed very, very fast); privatized government without legitimacy or vision for the future; more freedom of speech and less hypocrisy despite Putin's media control, but also cultural decline. We, the people, have not gained supremacy: "After all, national politics in Russia is today only weakly constrained by a democratic disposition in political life" (233).

Review by Hans Aage  
Department of Social Sciences
Roskilde University, Denmark
hansaa@ruc.dk

Seth Farber, Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005).¹⁵

My grandparents came to America from Hungary in 1912. My family who stayed there and the Hungarian Jewish population were mostly killed by the fascists in the bitter winter of l944, some 800,000. Twenty thousand alone died of the cold and disease, huddled in the great unheated synagogue, the largest in the world, on Dohany Street in Budapest. I was in Budapest with my wife and sister and friends in October 2005, vacationing and visiting my cousins. As it happened it was during Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday and new year. We are not religious, nor are my Hungarian relatives, but we asked them to take us to that synagogue for Yom Kippur services. It was quite stirring to be there amongst the remnant of that ancient Jewish community that had been in Budapest going back to the times of the Romans.

My Hungarian cousin Anti is still alive and vigorous at age 96. He was not picked up in l944 with the others but rather in l94l, because he was a communist. So was his wife Manci. They managed to place their two year old son Vili with a sympathetic Christian woman before being arrested and put in separate labor camps. Anti soon escaped and fought in the forests with the Partisans. He is a figure mentioned by his country’s historians. Manci lived. In l945 with the Russian liberation they returned to Budapest to fetch their son. Vili answered the door. "I am your mother," said Manci. "No you are not," answered Vili. "My mother was beautiful." She was ninety pounds and bald. So they started anew.

The history of the Zionists in Hungary is a sordid one, even before they established their exclusivist colonial settler state in Palestine. My cousins, who were not important people, were amongst the several thousand Hungarian Jews who survived the fire. A pact was signed by Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and Nazi exterminator Adolph Eichmann in l944 allowing 600 prominent Jews to leave in exchange for Zionist silence on the fate of the remainder. Malchiel Greenwald, a Hungarian survivor, exposed the deal and was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders at the time had actually drawn up the terms of the pact. Greenwald won. The Israeli court concluded, "The sacrifice of the majority of Hungarian Jews, in order to rescue the prominent ones [and send them to colonize Palestine – MSS] was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis... In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi SS opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner."¹⁶

In fact, members of the Zionist movement actively collaborated with Nazism from the beginning. The World Zionist Organization sabotaged world Jewry's attempt to boycott the Nazi economy in order to be allowed to send money from Germany to Palestine. They fought against liberalization of US immigration laws, for they wanted European Jews to go to Palestine, not America. As Ralph Schoenman, like me, an American Jew of Hungarian descent, wrote, "This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect manpower to Palestine would be impeded.”¹⁷ David Ben Gurion, later Israel’s first Prime Minister, summarized to a meeting of "left" Zionists in 1938 in England: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."¹⁸

In l940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, which was responsible for the actual organization of settlements in Palestine wrote: "Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries -- all of them. No village, not one tribe should be left."¹⁹

The United Nations partitioned Palestine in November of l947 and by May of l948, when the State of Israel was formally proclaimed, the Zionist army and militia had seized 75% of Palestine, forcing 780,000 Palestinians out of the country. Massacres attended Israel's birth. Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin commanded an operation in the Arab village of Deir Yasin which caused people to flee for their lives. Albert Einstein and others discribed it in a l948 letter to the New York Times: "This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9th (Begin's) terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants -- 240 men, women, and children -- and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem."²⁰

Begin gloated over the impact throughout Palestine of the Nazi-like operation he commanded at Deir Yasin: "A legend of terror spread amongst Arabs who were seized with panic at the mention of our Irgun soldiers. It was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Arabs throughout the country were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened uncontrollable stampede."²¹

The first time I toured and worked in Israel was over the summer of 1959. I was 16 years old; Israel was 11. Anti's brother Carl and his son managed to survive and get to Israel. They lived in Jaffa, a once Arab village north of Tel Aviv which was ethnically cleansed in l948. I found them in a two-room apartment off an alley. Carl's son, a boy of 10, greeted me at the door. He wore a blue shirt embroidered with white Chinese characters on the pocket. I recognized the shirt; it had once been my favorite. My grandmother must have sent it in one of the care packages she regularly assembled and mailed. Carl is dead now. So is his son. He was the last Israeli soldier to die in the 1967 war.

Seth Farber's extraordinarily intelligent book, consisting as it does of interviews with ten eloquent critics of Israel, and a fine editorial summation, strikingly demonstrates, as did my cousin's death, not only that Israel is a dangerous place for Jews (not the safe haven advertised by the Zionists), but also that the very existence of this State -- for whose establishment 385 out of 475 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were razed to the ground; where the construction of an apartheid wall and the widespread use of torture are an international disgrace; where to live, lease, sharecrop, or work on 93% of the land administered by the Jewish National Fund one must establish four generations of maternal Jewish descent; where only Jewish citizens have equal rights -- has undermined Judaism's ethical and humane tradition and the moral capital that oppressed Jews had accumulated over the centuries. As Farber writes in his introduction:

This book, this compilation is intended to be an affirmation of the moral and spiritual tradition of Judaism -- or at least of certain aspects of this tradition that probably most Jews, most Americans, agree constitute a valuable legacy. It is based on my conviction, shared by most of the individuals interviewed…, that this legacy was betrayed and is currently threatened with extinction by the policies of the state of Israel, and in particular its violation of the Palestinian people. It was betrayed also by the American Jewish establishment which gives active and unqualified support to Israel and has been willing to turn a blind eye to the considerable evidence that Israel's actions over the last few decades are those of a….state engaged in brutal military Occupation in violation of fundamental principles of international law....

Noam Chomsky, states in his interview that "the creation of a state as a Jewish state was a serious mistake…I thought then, and think now, that it is wrong in principle to establish a state that is not the state of its citizens, but rather, as the High Court later defined it, though it was clear enough from 1948 -- the sovereign state of the Jewish people, in Israel and the diaspora. Hence it is my state as an American Jew, though it is not the state of non-Jewish citizens. For the same reason, I would oppose moves to turn the U.S. into the sovereign state of the white (Christian, whatever) people, and I object to Islamic states, etc. It is a matter of principle, quite apart from the consequences."  He too, like contributors Joel Kovel, Norman Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Daniel Boyarin, Steve Quester, Adam Shapiro of the International Solidarity Movement, Phyllis Bennis, Norton Mezvinsky, and Orthodox Neturei Karta Rabbi David Weiss and his daughter Ora Weiss, make the central point that those who challenge the present consensus are keeping the prophetic tradition alive. In Rabbi Weiss’s words, "Zionism is the antithesis of Judaism" because Jews in their exile were supposed to be compassionate, "the work of the Jew is to perfect himself as best he could, to serve G-d and to emulate G-d and he should be a light unto nations," not "oppressing a second person."

Baylor University professor and Jewish theologian Marc Ellis says that the Jewish embrace of power and empire mirrors 4th-century Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity (in the middle of a battle, to better his chances) and the conversion and transformation of the Roman Empire to a Christian enterprise. He says today we have "Constantinian Judiasm" where "The Jewish Community is divided between those who support Jewish power without question and those who resist the use of that power to oppress and silence. A Constantinian Judaism has come into being, mirroring the empire-oriented Christianity that emerged….There is a civil war in the Jewish world that crosses geographic and cultural differences. There are Constantinian Jews in Israel and America; there are Jews of conscience all over the Jewish world."

The ideal my cousin Anti fought for was the communist goal of universal human emancipation. This was not the Zionists’ aim, neither in its theoretical conception nor in its predictable and proven results. In l887 the Zionist Congress sent a delegation of rabbis from Vienna to Palestine. They reported back that "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man." The Zionists nonetheless persisted with their project of overwhelming and displacing the Palestinians, with the consequence that in the name of Judaism they have put into jeopardy the morality of the religion that gave us the Ten Commandments, especially the first. The eminent scholar of Jewish origin, Isaac Deutscher, wrote in the wake of the war that killed my cousin:

I hope that together with other nations, the Jews will ultimately become aware -- or regain awareness -- of the inadequacy of the nation-state, and that they will find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who have gone beyond Jewry (Spinoza, Marx, Luxemburg, Heine, Freud, Einstein, Trotsky) has left us -- the message of universal human emancipation.²²

This book with its probing interviews and unsparing analyses is a sunbeam of piercing truth, carrying the debate over Israel/Palestine to the highest level of understanding. 

Review by Michael Steven Smith
National Lawyers Guild
Member of 1985 human rights delegation to West Bank and Gaza



John Sanbonmatsu, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004)

John Sanbonmatsu offers in this book a compelling call for a new strategic vision for the left as it confronts global capitalism. The contemporary stage of capitalist globalization has intensified social inequality, state coercion (both internally and externally), and ecological destruction, but with “the waning of the nation-state” (9), the major institution to which leftists have looked to address these problems is no longer adequate. This condition, Sanbonmatsu argues, provides opportunities for transnational social movements--movements which in both their organizational form and substantive concerns transcend national boundaries--to shape an alternative future. Unfortunately, the left has to date been unable to match the effectiveness of the globalizing capitalist forces which dominate the state and the market. Sanbonmatsu’s book is an attempt, within the broadly defined field of critical theory, to examine why this has been the case. He places much of the blame for this situation on the increasingly important role that postmodern theory has played in left politics. He pulls no punches: “postmodernism’s obfuscations, misdirections, and spatial and logical distortions seriously jeopardize the future of emancipatory thought and action” (99).

The roots of the left’s political impasse lie, according to Sanbonmatsu, in the legacy of the New Left. Sanbonmatsu identifies five major “core themes” (22) of the New Left: the liberation of the individual, a non-reductionist theory of culture and psychology, direct action, participatory democracy, and decentralization. These themes produced a “romantic structure of feeling” in which the New Left “privileged emotive and aesthetic expression of an inner, ‘radical’ nature over considerations of strategy, theoretical coherence, or the patient construction of a counter-hegemonic movement.” With the failure of the New Left rebellions (through either repression or cooptation) and with the conservative backlash that followed, many leftists turned to postmodernism. Postmodern theory, for which Sanbonmatsu sees Foucault as the major representative, rejects totality and meta-narrative for more localized knowledges and identities. The effort to define ‘truth’ is, for postmodernists, an act of domination. Related to this is postmodernists’ capillary image of power, which conceives of power as diffuse rather than exercised in centralized forms. With its concern for identity and locality and its decentralized understanding of power, postmodern theory was an obvious extension of New Left expressivism.

This development, however, came at considerable cost to the left. Sanbonmatsu argues that the increasing divorce of left theory from practice, which was so clearly articulated by Perry Anderson in his critique of Western Marxism, was amplified in the context of postmodern theory. He describes postmodern theory as baroque, “a form of ‘critical’ knowledge that has lost the memory of its original use value” (75). Rather than theory being tested by and serving as a resource for practice, postmodern theory is theory for its own sake, estranged from practice. He is sharply critical of postmodern theory’s faux populism, in which the validity of local knowledges is proclaimed through an increasingly arcane and commodified language. Indeed, theory becomes practice (this is not unique to postmodern theory – Sanbonmatsu discusses Althusser’s contribution in this regard). Since subjectivity is constructed through discourse, revolution becomes an “’insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ – never an insurrection of actual human beings, but of knowledges, concepts” (115); the theorist, the one who reveals these subjugated knowledges, becomes the true agent of history.

Of greatest concern to Sanbonmatsu is how postmodern theory undermines leadership and strategy. Postmodernists’ rejection of totality and their embrace of fragmentation make it impossible to see the how differences relate to each other. The postmodernist celebration of difference becomes a fetish, he argues, that ultimately undermines resistance. For example, Sanbonmatsu is critical of the theme of ‘breaking the silence’ common within postmodern theory and identity-based social movements. While speaking one’s own voice is a powerful form of self-affirmation and resistance, postmodern theory leaves unanswered the question of who is to hear this speech and how this speech could be understood by others if there is no shared meaning. The resulting political fragmentation “occludes the true radical significance, the universal significance, of every particular movement. And this, of course, is just the way that dominant regimes of power want it” (198). In addition, the meaning of any political action can only be understood in the context of an understanding of the broader balance of forces in society. Absent an understanding of totality, the very meaning of resistance –- the structural opportunities and resources available, evaluations of success and failure, etc. –- is impossible to know.
           
Postmodern theory, for Sanbonmatsu, thus offers a false path for the left. A more constructive alternative for left politics, he asserts, is the work of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony sees power as being a function of the ruling class’s ability to generate consent for its rule. The ruling class must take into account the interests of subordinate classes and must grant concessions if it is to consolidate its power. These concessions can offer important material and cultural benefits to subordinate classes, but Gramsci argues that these concessions are designed to leave fundamental power relations untouched. In this way the ruling class exercises leadership to create a unified hegemonic bloc out of different and often conflicting social forces.

Gramsci extended this analysis of power to radical movements. If the hegemonic bloc with its commitment to capitalism is to be defeated, opponents must construct their own hegemonic bloc -– a counter-hegemony –- that unites social forces around an alternative, anti-capitalist common sense. It was the political party -– the ‘modern prince,’ in Gramsci’s words –- that was to serve as the organizer of this counter-hegemony. It was the job of the party to exercise leadership in uniting a broad array of oppositional forces, to appraise the terrain of political struggle (for example, by evaluating the opportunities for resistance and the availability of resources), and to articulate a meaningful alternative to capitalism. In contrast to conceptions of the party as a vanguard, which Sanbonmatsu defines as ‘bureaucratic centralism,’ he uses the term ‘democratic centralism’ to describe Gramsci’s modern prince. This term captures quite nicely the dialectic of unity and difference (or, expressed another way, leadership and autonomy) that Sanbonmatsu sees as essential for left political strategy.

In the present, postmodern stage of capitalism, Sanbonmatsu argues, the left has “been forced by history to abandon the ‘skin’ of socialism and the International, the Party.” The challenge facing the left, therefore, is whether “the now-dispersed forces of emancipation [can]…discover or invent a new form” (9). This new ‘skin’ for the left is, for Sanbonmatsu, the postmodern prince; indeed, he argues that the postmodern prince is “the direct historical successor to the international socialist movement” (203). The postmodern prince is “the name of the new collective subject which must gather up the myriad dispersed movements of oppositional practice and culture in the form of a single movement whose outward expansion establishes a genuinely democratic and ethical culture” (17). The postmodern prince is postmodern not in the sense of rejecting strategy, but rather in that it constitutes the new form of political organization that emerges from and has the capacity to transform the current stage of capitalism. Where Gramsci’s modern prince was national, the postmodern prince must be transnational.

In his use of the Gramscian perspective to develop the concept of the postmodern prince Sanbonmatsu makes a major contribution to critical theories of globalization. Given the strength of his analysis, however, I would have liked to see some discussion, even if only preliminary, of the organizational form of the postmodern prince. Gramsci’s modern prince had a concrete organizational form -– the party. Does the World Social Forum serve as the postmodern prince, or does it have the potential to do so? If not, what concrete forms might the postmodern prince take? Sanbonmatsu’s conclusion, in which he asserts that the postmodern prince must be committed to a meta-humanist perspective, is the closest he comes to addressing this question. Humanism was a central element of modernity and modern revolutionary movements, but the exclusion of the nonhuman has had very destructive ecological and social consequences. The elevation of humanity, with its singular capacity for reason, above other forms of life transformed nature into a standing reserve to be exploited. At the same time, the existence of life-forms deemed less than human has served as an important resource in the destruction of ‘the Other’ through racist violence, war, and genocide; the long history of images in U.S. popular culture equating African-Americans with primates is just one example of this. The postmodern prince, Sanbonmatsu argues, must transcend the modernist boundary between human and nonhuman if it is to be an effective counter-hegemonic leader. Given the central role that Gramsci plays in his argument, I was surprised that Sanbonmatsu did not address how Gramsci’s humanism relates to his argument. Does Gramsci’s theory ground the call for meta-humanism and, if so, how?

These are relatively minor concerns, however, that do not undermine Sanbonmatsu’s argument. In the end, he is devastating in his critique of postmodern theory, particularly Foucault, and equally effective in offering Gramsci as a powerful alternative from which to build resistance to global capitalism. Overall, Sanbonmatsu has made an important contribution to both social theory and left political strategy.

Review by Daniel Egan
University of Massachusetts-Lowell
Daniel_Egan@uml.edu

Melanie E.L. Bush, Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

Melanie Bush’s book presents research she conducted between 1998 and 2000 with students and some faculty and staff members of Brooklyn College, which is part of the City University of New York. In her study, Bush aimed to uncover and explore her subjects’ attitudes about race. She was particularly interested in how white students perpetuate racism even when they profess to be non-racist or “color blind.”

Her chapters explore the respondents’ comments on racial identity (their own and that of others), “American” identity, democracy, American symbols, the experiences of recent immigrants, and racialized rules of etiquette that for many of the respondents dictate how they interact with members of their own and different racial groups. She also discusses the intersection of her respondents’ beliefs about race with their beliefs about poverty, wealth, discrimination, and privilege. She summarizes her findings as a list of mechanisms that many white people employ to evade thinking critically about race, their own racialized privilege, and economic and political structures that perpetuate racialized privilege and discrimination.

In her introduction to the anthology White Out, which she co-edited with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ashley “Woody” Doane argues that whiteness studies go astray when they are not explicitly anti-racist. Work on whiteness has “the potential danger of deflecting work on race relations toward a relatively meaningless debate on the construction of white identity” if whiteness is studied apart from a critical examination of white supremacy.²³

Bush avoids this pitfall. Her stance in opposition to white supremacy is clear and informed. Her concluding effort is to look for “cracks in the wall of whiteness.” According to Bush, these “cracks” are ambiguous feelings held by white students about the demands of white supremacy and their concerns about the economic prospects of working-class and middle-class white people. Bush argues that these concerns can be used as a starting point for encouraging white students to critically engage with the ways that white supremacy, while it privileges them, is also the structure designed by white elites to exploit them.

Another important aspect of the book is that it is based on the premise, which I defend in my book Ethics along the Color Line, that, in Bush’s words, “the everyday thinking of ordinary people integrally relates to the perpetuation of patterns of systemic racial inequality” (33). To claim this is not to claim that the perpetuation of white supremacy is exclusively a function of individual racism. Carmichael and Hamilton’s concept of “institutional racism” was an important counter to previous definitions of racism that had focused only on individually held racist beliefs and individuals’ performances of racist acts. Institutional racism, as defined by Carmichael and Hamilton, describes the ways in which institutional structures that are not explicitly racist in intent and are not necessarily kept in place as racist actions may nonetheless be oppressive to black people.²⁴ For example, a policy such as “last hired, first fired,” while not explicitly racist, has discriminatory effects on black employees in a context in which black employees have only recently been admitted to a company.

The concept of institutional racism was an extremely important contribution to understanding white supremacy. Now that the problem of institutional racism is widely recognized, however, the failure to change structures to eliminate institutional racism is best understood as a form of racism on the part of the people who are in a position to make those changes. The claim that “we didn’t understand what the effects of our policies were” has become disingenuous. Ultimately -- and this is a major feature of Bush’s approach -- attitudes that lead individuals to deny -- or to acknowledge but fail to challenge -- racist structures are what keep those structures in place. Of course, one individual alone cannot, by herself, tear down a structure. She can weaken it, however, and individuals coming together and challenging structures is the only way to dismantle them.

The conclusions that Bush draws from her data are nothing new to readers who are familiar with these kinds of discussions. White students profess to be non-racist, yet they believe that the continuing disproportionate poverty of black people is due to black people failing to take advantage of the supposedly increased opportunities available to them. White students believe that racial discrimination has decreased significantly and is no longer much of an obstacle to black achievement. White students express defensiveness about the possibility that they might be racist; they deny their white privilege -- especially if they are struggling financially themselves -- and blame black people for depriving them of opportunities (“they get all the scholarships, they have affirmative action”). None of this, unfortunately, is at all surprising. Bush’s book is a useful update to the available data, however. I have found when trying to teach my students about these issues that even data that are only ten years old are unconvincing to them. They just say, “Well, that was a long time ago; things have changed since then.” It is important, therefore, to have updates available in order to show young people that things are not changing (or are changing for the worse). Furthermore, Bush cites many of the most important older studies, so she is not setting herself up as having invented the wheel: she is very clear that she is building upon and updating data that were gathered earlier. She presents the arguments in Breaking the Code of Good Intentions very accessibly, and she gives numerous references, particularly for the kinds of horrific facts that catch students’ attention and provoke discussion. This would be an excellent book to use in a variety of undergraduate and even graduate courses on race. She also gives a nice summary in the first chapter of some important works in whiteness studies and critical race theory. Hers is not a comprehensive list, which is better in some ways because it is useful for a beginning reader, new to the field, to have some ideas about what else to read without getting overwhelmed.

Finally, Bush discusses the role that colleges and universities should play in educating students about white supremacy and the stranglehold that the very wealthy have on political power in the United States. At the very end of the book, she notes the positive response of many students to a core curriculum course at Brooklyn College in which students learn about these issues. It is not clear how many of the participants in her survey had taken that course. If they had, then it’s not working. But if many had not, then maybe there is still hope. At any rate, her book affirms the important idea that colleges and universities at their best serve as laboratories in our human experiment, not only in the sense of being places to conduct useful research on a relatively captive population but also in the sense of being places to try out possible solutions to our most pressing problems.

Review by Anna Stubblefield
Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University-Newark
get2anna@andromeda.rutgers.edu

Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005),

Joe Berry’s book gives us some good practical advice about organizing adjunct faculty, but promises something else which it does not deliver. In part, it is a well-written organizing manual for part-time college faculty, or contingents as Berry designates them. It gives pragmatic steps for analyzing individual needs and establishing communicative liaisons among part-time faculty in varying college situations. This is a how-to guide in the mode of The Troublemakers Handbook, and this part of the book is very strong. It strikes me, however, as a long-term adjunct professor at CUNY (City University of New York), that the book fails to provide a vision of how the corporate university can be radically restructured, or how--in a detailed pragmatic sense--organized groups of contingent faculty can deal with established unions who will aid them, welcome them as members, and then stipulate the "adjunct" agenda so as not to disturb the benefits that the union has won for its full-time faculty members. Many of these full-time faculty members look down with disdain at the contingent faculty members, who are often as qualified as they are.

As a catalyst for organizing, Berry paraphrases an old union organizer: all organizing revolves around a demand for respect--respect for the people who are doing the work and respect for the work they are doing. Within a Marxist framework Berry states: "My central argument is that the new majority faculty (contingents) is a group that has experienced proletarianization in nearly all its classical components: declining wages and job security, loss of ancillary compensation, loss of autonomy and control of the work process and finally loss of the (professional) prerequisites that have traditionally gone with the work of the (tenured) college teacher." Pointing out that there is a double-consciousness among contingent faculty he states: "In a less extreme form [than W.E.B Du Bois noted] contingent faculty must maintain one face to those who have or might have power over them, and another face shared only among themselves." There is a huge contrast between public perception of the status of contingent faculty, and the reality of their existence. If you look like a professor and teach like one, then you must be one, even though the hidden reality is that you are not treated or compensated like one.

As Berry sees it, the two priority issues for contingent faculty are job security and equal pay for equal work. In regard to job security he mentions "security of assignment, placement and retention." When he discusses equal pay for equal work, short of a post-capitalist alternative economy, which he indicates is not around the corner, he cites equal pay as a principle that draws disparate individuals into collective engagement to work for equity. This collective effort can lead to discussions of larger issues of compensation for those involved.

Berry discusses the sense of fear, isolation and hopelessness that comes to the fore among contingent faculty when faced with the difficult prospect of organizing themselves to improve their situation. How do you build a real union that serves the needs of part-timers? He discusses the building of unions for contingent faculty. He urges that as many people as possible be included in any new group. In numbers there is strength. Graduate students should be part of the organizing effort and should be treated as colleagues. He mentions the PSC (Professional Staff Congress), the CUNY union, which includes full and part-time faculty as well as administrators among its members, as a group that through its organizational efforts has had a great influence on the higher education union movement. The PSC at CUNY is currently supporting the fight of the NYU graduate students against the draconian anti-union stand of the NYU administration. And yet its efforts to improve the situation of CUNY adjuncts have shown meager results.

In terms of building larger alliances with other groups for fledgling contingent faculty organizations, Berry provides practical suggestions for metropolitan area organizing. He advocates virtual (online) and actual contingent faculty centers which provide services and assistance to contingents. It is very important to develop a comprehensive resource list to explore issues and provide information for contingent faculty. The next step is extensive work to build alliances and coalitions with other groups, with a broad outreach effort to other unions, community groups and students. He finally quotes a trenchant comment from a 50-year-old contingent faculty organizer who was fired from teaching and was concerned with the general quality of teaching and education: "The problem I see is the whole educational system. The whole system encourages incompetence. The public does not know this. We need to have a hands-on look at what people are really doing in the classroom."
           
In the section of the book "Getting Down to Work," Berry makes the prescient remark that "if we act like a doormat, we will get walked upon." As Bob Marley says: "Stand up for your rights." This is easier said than done, as Berry points out. There are real divisions in college faculties among contingent, tenure-track, and full-time non-tenure track faculty. He suggests we elicit the support of full-time faculty by "appealing to their sense of fairness and decency." The great difficulty in my experience is that many full-time faculty members acknowledge the inequities, but see themselves as a privileged group that is being threatened by the demands of contingents. Rather than supporting the fight for more for everyone, they themselves are trying to hold on to what they have. They are like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the flood with his finger in the dike.

To turn the attitudes of full-time faculty around would take extraordinarily skilled efforts in "consciousness raising" by the contingent faculty and their organized groups. They would have to get the majority of the full-time faculty involved in the collective fight for funding and a reversal of their declining role in university governance and policy.
           
Yes, the pie seems to be shrinking, with government funding decreasing, and tuition for working-class students in public universities increasing. But a real alliance between part-timers and full-timers could potentially create a mutual awareness that "their problem" (contingent faculty) is "our problem" too. A concerted effort to increase government funding to move towards economic parity for contingent faculty is needed. In order to teach well, all faculty need to have job security, equitable pay, health and pension benefits, and access to support facilities and grants for professional
development.
           
The administration of the City University has put forward a sham advertising campaign that appears in all New York City subway cars. Ads state "Study with the Best" and show notable full-time faculty members in various CUNY colleges mentoring students in their respective fields. What the ads do not say is that more than fifty percent of the classes at CUNY are taught by contingent faculty who are underpaid, exploited and treated with disrespect. Getting corporate-connected and politically partisan trustees off the boards of public universities would be a first step towards changing things.

The university should not have its policies dictated by a corporate CEO's concept of a bottom line, making educational institutions into privatized profit centers. Public universities need to become more responsive again to the needs of the faculty, staff and students and their varied community constituencies. And as I recently discovered, the PSC (the CUNY union) is not an equal party with management in contract negotiations. CUNY management is the final arbiter of structural and financial changes in the contract. All major proposals relating to achieving equity and parity for contingent faculty were swept off the table in the final contract negotiations at the insistence of management, which totally denied adjunct concerns. Adjuncts at CUNY are being screwed not only by university management, but by their own union too.  

A radical rethinking of the nature of the 21st-century university by interactive groups of faculty (full- and part-time) and students, without a nostalgic nod to a past "golden age," is a possibility. Model centers of academic innovation could be created to point the way to viable future developments for a wide range of students. These actions could be a start towards reclaiming the university for all involved. A more radical question lurks in the shadows: Is the current university worth reclaiming at all? Or should we get down to the business of creating -- and financing -- an alternative entity that is less hierarchical and more responsive to the needs of the faculty, students, and the diverse members of their communities?

Berry's book raises many questions about contingent faculty and the function and role of the university in our current society. He gives us suggestions for incremental change, and provokes thought about the dramatic corporatization of the university today and what we need to do about reclaiming the university for all of us. Whether this is possible or not, without a radical change in our larger society, is an open question.

Review by Howard Pflanzer
Adjunct Associate Professor of Theatre
Center for Worker Education, City College of New York
hpflanzer@yahoo.com

David C. Brotherton and Luis Barrios, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

The current direction of gang research began to take form in the 1970s, when there was a renewed public interest in the topic of gangs, occasioned in part by rapidly increasing rates of crime and violence in major cities, riots, white flight, de-industrialization and urban decay. Gang research (once again) became popular and relevant, but now circumscribed by expectations that its findings would help ameliorate the “gang problem” without significant cost or disruption of the status quo – i.e., without a renewed call for the “liberal” policies of the 1960s and/or for anything more radical. A more “scientific” and politically palatable version of the field emerged, whereby researchers attempt to find “causes” of such problems as “gang violence” and the “spread” of gangs, as they are framed in public political discourse (which is to say, ideologically), as opposed to trying to subvert the dominant frames through any particular focus, emphasis, or mode of explanation. The “debunking” motif exemplified in earlier forms of gang research began to disappear.

In the process, typologies proliferated, quantitative methodologies became sophisticated and dominant, and reliance on official (police) sources of information increased precipitously. At the same time, disciplinary consensus as to the definition of gangs remained virtually nonexistent. The problem of definition is universally acknowledged in the field, yet mostly bracketed in the course of research. That is to say, if gang researchers appear troubled by the fact that they cannot define what they are researching and explaining, it doesn’t generally stop them from talking about gangs of various “types” or “in general.” Nor does there appear much hesitation among researchers when it comes to offering solutions, one after another, to “the gang problem.” The relevant questions in this regard include: What makes any group a “gang”? What makes any of the groups that are labeled “gangs” by researchers or law enforcement more similar to one another than to any other groups? What makes such groups – “gangs” – incapable of change in pro-social directions?

Brotherton and Barrios’s book makes these questions unavoidable. It presents a detailed case study of the New York Chapter of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (ALKQN) during the late 1990s – an especially tumultuous period in New York City. The research on which it is based is mostly ethnographic. It includes some demographic data and more than 150 semi-structured, life-history interviews. Significant detail is provided on the contents of group subculture, including written texts, symbolic systems of communication, and ideological doctrines. The history of the group is also illustrated in detail (from numerous sources), with emphasis on relations between the group, the community and local politics. The authors show that the ALKQN became politically active in the late 1990s and, in the process, enacted a series of internal reforms that made it possible to broaden its political agenda and network of allies and supporters. Also shown, state repression became more intense and indiscriminate as the group gained political credibility and efficacy. The ongoing participation of high-ranking members in criminal activities (primarily small-time drug dealing) is also examined in various contexts, including with regard to community response, public relations, internal dynamics, etc. An outpouring of community support for the ALKQN materialized in 1998 in response to Operation Crown, a police sweep that remains virtually unprecedented in size and scope in the history of New York City. It began to dissipate only with the imprisonment of King Tone, the leader and public face of the ALKQN during its political phase.

Luis Barrios, who is an Episcopalian minister and college professor, encountered the Kings and Queens in his congregation. The group appears to have sought him out as a result of his reputation as an activist with roots in many past political struggles. The co-author, David Brotherton, also with activist credentials, became involved after Barrios invited him to the church to observe. Clearly something was happening, the authors recount. The enthusiasm of the congregation, which included hundreds of members of the ALKQN, in response to fiery sermons of Father Barrios (an adherent of liberation theology) was palpable. Community forums and political rallies and demonstrations also began to include the ALKQN. The grievances of the group (especially regarding the issue of militarized policing), together with its direct, confrontational style of political participation, were embraced by large segments of the barrio. As Brotherton and Barrios demonstrate throughout their book, the “bourgeois renaissance” in New York over the last decade increased the range and scope of inequities. Its legitimacy in mainstream media and public, political discourse, therefore, was predicated on the ability of the Giuliani administration to discredit and silence oppositional voices, to destroy nascent oppositional tendencies and forces of every kind, in overtly authoritarian fashion.

The authors’ involvement with the ALKQN took many turns throughout the course of research, often obscuring the relation between observer and observed. For instance, Barrios testified in criminal court, several times, in cases involving the ALKQN. He also gave interviews to various media outlets on behalf of the ALKQN, such as the following with the New York Times. “Let me tell you what I’m supporting in the Latin Kings/Queens Nation. They came out taking sides against police brutality and I came out saying, ‘That’s good. I’m supporting you.’ They came out with this issue of organizing tutoring sessions for children in after school, and I said, ‘I support that.’ They came out against mayor Giuliani, and I said, ‘I support that.’ And every time they come out with one of these issues, I’m saying ‘I support them. OK?’” (184). Brotherton and Barrios’s investment in the outcome of the struggles of the ALKQN is clear; indeed, they would have liked to see a more thorough politicization of the group, with fewer contradictions. But it does not seem to compromise the objectivity of their research, even as layers of intrigue are added, again and again. Moreover, it is doubtful that a more passive engagement with the group would have produced real insights -– which is to say, insights of a kind that anyone besides researchers themselves should care about.

Brotherton and Barrios refer to the ALKQN throughout the book as a “street organization” –- since this is the name preferred by members themselves. “Street organization” is defined as “a group formed largely by youth and adults of a marginalized social class which aims to provide its members with a resistant identity, an opportunity to be individually and collectively empowered, a voice to speak back to and challenge the dominant culture, a refuge from the stresses and strains of barrio or ghetto life, and a spiritual enclave within which its own sacred rituals can be generated and practiced” (23). This definition is confusing because it is not clear what is being defined. In regard to the ALKQN, at least during the period of Brotherton and Barrios’s study, it seems entirely proper. But the authors believe that the term applies, at least conceivably, to other groups (“gangs”) as well. It is open to question whether other researchers dealing with other groups will turn up similar findings – not only whether it is possible to find similar cases. This book should inspire researchers to reevaluate dominant paradigms and many commonplace research assumptions. It should also inspire activists to take a closer look at “gangs.”

Review by Louis Kontos
John Jay College
City University of New York
lkontos@jjay.cuny.edu

Daniel R. Faber and Deborah McCarthy, eds., Foundations for Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Philanthropic organizations have grown increasingly wealthy over the past decades and, simultaneously, the number of social movement groups has mushroomed. Social movements need money and foundations need to give money away. But foundations, as creations of the elite, are rarely set up to be tools of wealth redistribution or genuine systemic change; their creators benefit too profoundly from the status quo. Thus, philanthropic foundations prefer to fund mainstream and professional movements that don’t rock the boat. Yet social movements, even radical ones, are often dependent on foundation funding and many movement organizations would cease to exist in the absence of foundation support. This dilemma is a central theme in the articles assembled here by Daniel Faber and Deborah McCarthy. 

This volume provides an excellent overview of the relationship between philanthropic foundations and social movement organizations from a critical perspective. Together, the chapters produce a basic outline of what foundations have and have not accomplished and introduce key theoretical perspectives on philanthropy and social movements. The book is designed to speak to a varied audience that might include those who work in foundations and nonprofit organizations, social movement activists, academics, and students (this would be a good book to assign in a social movements course). The contributors include scholars, social movement leaders and officials, from philanthropic foundations.

In the introductory chapter, editors Faber and McCarthy delineate serious problems with philanthropic foundations. Funding agents rarely recognize the connectedness between various social issues (including crime, poverty, environment, etc.) and they often fund programs that are not grounded in the communities they serve, exacerbating an existing civic disempowerment. Ideally the answer to these and the many other problems with the traditional funding system is social change philanthropy, which is more progressive and inclusive.

The rest of the chapters are organized into two major sections. The first section, a “Critical Overview of Social Change Philanthropy,” contains chapters on progressive, liberal, conservative, and alternative funding institutions. These chapters introduce different types of foundations and their histories, as well as newer models and trends. Susan Ostrander describes social change philanthropy, with a focus on the Haymarket Foundation and women’s funds, both of which are more democratic than most foundations and both of which try to hand over much of the financial decision-making to grantees. The chapter by Joan Roelofs, a condensed version of some themes from her recent book, argues that liberal foundations play an important role in “conserving capitalism.” Roelofs states, “[Foundations] sustain consensus by grafting new and destabilizing trends into the dominant ideology, initiating essential reforms, and providing employment or resources for restless and cheeky activists and intellectuals” (62). Sally Covington argues that conservative funding organizations, unlike progressive and liberal foundations, are coordinated. They have funded and founded advocacy, litigation, and public policy groups. They have also funded right-wing media and encouraged right-wing intellectuals, with the idea of flooding the ‘idea marketplace’ with their information and ideas. Finally, Robert Bothwell’s chapter compares conservative philanthropy with funding for progressive causes. Unlike the very organized and coordinated conservative funders, progressive and alternative funding organizations have had little impact on national policy; they have locked themselves into “policy silos—each focusing on specific issues,” and have been “slow to forge a broad central vision (or visions) that might serve to counter the growing power of the conservative movement” (117).

The second section, “Specific Challenges to Social Change Philanthropy,” is something of a hodgepodge of case studies and theoretical pieces, but it does all add up. There are chapters on foundation funding and the environmental movement (Robert Brulle and Craig Jenkins); environmental justice (Faber and McCarthy); minority-identified movements (Lisa Duran); and community initiatives (Ira Silver). These chapters reiterate themes presented in the first section: foundations tend to support mainstream and professional organizations; foundation funding leads to channeling or cooptation; foundations rarely support organizations that seek radical change; and foundations are reluctant to fund long-term projects or operating costs, which is what many movement organizations need most.

This section includes a hopeful chapter by John C. Urschel about Resource Generation, an educational organization designed to help very, very rich young people think about giving their money away in progressive ways, by rejecting paternalism and allowing grantees more control of resources. The final chapter by Ostrander, Silver and McCarthy questions a theoretical tenet of social movement scholarship that assumes a funding dilemma whereby movements must either obtain money from big funders (and thereby risk cooptation) or seek support from inside their organizations (an thereby risk having too few resources to do anything). The authors conclude that the funding dilemma is “falsely dichotomized and overly constrained” (283); under certain conditions, movement organizations can work with funders in active ways to avoid certain funding pitfalls.

The fact that the contributors are not all academics is theoretically an asset; however, a weakness that springs from this is that the chapters are somewhat uneven; some are research-based, while others are more in the vein of the think piece. Nonetheless, the chapters complement each other nicely and incorporate similar theoretical understandings to examine and illustrate a variety of initiatives and organizations.

While contributors repeatedly call attention to the problems with philanthropy and the real challenges for getting more of the huge amount of foundation money distributed differently, several authors describe what can go right with philanthropy and some also discuss new opportunities, such as a trend among some wealthy baby-boomers to engage in progressive or alternative types of philanthropy. I wished for more positive case studies at the end that could illustrate social change philanthropy as truly having great potential to replace old-style funding, but the sad truth is that such glowing examples are apparently few. This is not a problem with the book; it is a failure of social change and alternative philanthropy (so far, at least) to live up to its transformative potential.

What does the system of philanthropic funding mean for progressive social change and the reinvigoration of civil society and democracy? The summary answer to be gleaned from this book is that the current system is inadequate for truly fostering social justice and democratic renewal. Foundations for Change is an important contribution for those who would better understand how and why this is the case and what alternatives might be nurtured for the future.  

Review by Leslie King
Smith College
lesking@smith.edu

Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, trans. James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).

Those who have come to rely on Samir Amin’s penetrating critical analyses of the latest depredations of capitalism and its ruling classes will not be disappointed with The Liberal Virus. In this short but powerfully argued work, Amin attacks the ideology and practice of economic liberalism, in both its past and present (“neo”) incarnations. The title’s metaphor dramatically underscores the point that capitalism’s most recent “mutation” poses an increasingly grave threat, not only to its most desperate victims – the billions of “unvaccinated” peasants of the global South who face displacement and impoverishment courtesy of neoliberal economic practices – but also to anyone who opposes the policies of a militant US, which is the world’s most virulent proponent of neoliberalism.

In his first two chapters, “The Liberal Vision of Society” and “The Ideological and Para-Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” Amin exposes the delusional nature of (neo)liberal ideology, which promotes the view that, left to itself (that is, unfettered by state intervention), capitalism will create “an optimal equilibrium” and thereby the best of all possible worlds. For Amin, such nonsense should be viewed as a “para-theory” of “an imaginary capitalism” since, in the real world, “[t]he ‘competition’ between capitals – which defines capitalism – suppresses the possibility of realizing any sort of general equilibrium and thus renders illusory any analysis founded on such a supposed tendency.” As Amin notes,

The articulation between the logics produced by this competition of capitals and those which are deployed through the evolution of the social relations of production (among capitalists, between them and the exploited and dominated classes, among the states which form capitalism as a world system) accounts, after the fact, for the movement of the system as it displaces itself from one disequilibrium to another.. . . The idea that there exists an economic logic (which economic science enables us to discover) that governs the development of capitalism is an illusion. (14-15)

Of course, most apologists for neoliberalism would respond that, whether or not a capitalist utopia is possible, the material benefits of globalization are as evident as the differences between the economies of North and South Korea. In his discussion in chapter three of the consequences of really-existing globalized neoliberalism, however, Amin argues that the lives of the three billion people who subsist on food produced by “peasant agricultures” are not likely to be improved by the introduction of capitalist farming techniques and the adoption of “the principle of profitability.” Rather, if peasant agriculture is “integrated into the whole set of general rules of ‘competition’” (as the World Trade Organization demands that it should be), the likely scenario is that a relatively small number of “agribusinesses” will end up displacing most rural peasant producers (33). In an earlier period, Amin writes, the reserve army of laborers created by displaced peasants (from land enclosures in Europe, for example) was absorbed by growing urban industries or by colonies abroad. Today, however, the likely result of such displacement would be a “planetary shantytown of five billion human beings ‘too many’” (34).

To prevent this potential disaster, Amin argues, peasant agriculture must be preserved “for the entire visible future of the twenty-first century,” and the internal prices of agricultural products in developing countries should be delinked from those of the world market. This would allow farmers to increase productivity while at the same time the “population transfer from the countryside towards the cities” could be controlled (35). The real solution to “the new agrarian question,” though, “will be found by going beyond the logic of capitalism” and by making “the long, secular transition to world socialism” (35).

In the short term, though, Amin urges that new alliances be created to contain the liberal virus. The United States -- whose history of “uncompromising liberalism” is reviewed by Amin in his fourth chapter (“The Origins of Liberalism”) -- is of course the major obstacle to achieving the kind of world that Amin envisions; however, Amin suggests that “the old world” (i.e., Europe) offers some hope in reversing the current neoliberal trend. Although Europe is a partner in the “Triad” that includes the US and Japan, its political culture (which includes workers’ parties, a long history of class struggles, and social democracies) contrasts in many ways with that of the US. The “dominant segments of [European] capital,” Amin writes, “are of course defenders of globalized neoliberalism and as a result agree to pay the price of their subordination to the North American leader” (108); however, there are also in Europe “political, social, and ideological forces that support – often with lucidity – the vision of ‘another Europe’ (social and friendly in its relations with the South)” (109). Amin suggests that

[i]f this humanist and democratic political culture of “old Europe” prevails -- and it is possible that it will – then an authentic rapprochement among Europe, Russia, China, Asia, and Africa would form the foundation upon which it would be possible to construct a democratic and peaceful pluricentric world. (108)

In his final chapter, Amin describes a number of the challenges that neoliberalism poses to those who would create such a world. These challenges include the redefinition of “the European project” so that Europe can begin to “disassociate itself on the international plane from the exclusive demands of a collective imperialism in its relations with the East and the South” (89); the “reestablishment of the solidarity of the peoples of the South,” who must condemn the U.S. policy of “preventive war” and “demand the evacuation of all foreign military bases in Asia, Africa and Latin America” (97); and the reconstruction of “a peoples’ internationalism,” which, as mentioned above, could be “crystallized at the international diplomatic level by stabilizing the Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Peking axis, strengthened by the development of friendly relations between this axis and the reconstituted Afro-Asiatic front” (111).

If the plan that Amin outlines here doesn’t exactly sound like socialism, it is nonetheless a necessary step toward that goal, he believes, since these new alliances would force the US “to accept coexistence with nations determined to defend their own interests” (111). Absent the threat of US military and economic intervention, the liberal virus would be contained and real strides could be made toward economic justice and true democracy – that is, democracy that reflects the will of working people rather than the fluctuations of the market.
 
Review by David Siar
Winston-Salem State University
siard@wssu.edu

Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).

This book is a thorough study of the frontiers of Caribbean tourism. It provides a wealth of knowledge about the players and the industry, and advocates new models for sustainable tourism in the region.

The author presents tourism as an alternative to diminishing banana and sugar regimes. She outlines its potential for success but also profiles three external forces -- airlines, sales agents, and hotels -- as obstacles to domestic control. She identifies at least 13 airlines plying Caribbean routes, of which only 2 (Air Jamaica and BWIA) are of local origin. As a result of this imbalance, 85% of flight arrivals are on foreign carriers, which can cut back service without regard to local needs.

In similar fashion the book underlines the significance of tour operators who control the selection of flights, hotels, ground operation and day trips, and are thus in a position to influence travelers to Caribbean destinations. It also emphasizes the prominent role of foreign-owned hotels, which can expand or limit the success of the islands in attracting visitors.

Overall dependency relations impede cooperation between the tourism and agricultural sectors, limit upward mobility among workers, and favor large hotels over smaller ones. The author bemoans the agricultural sector’s limited involvement in supplying food to the tourist business, but applauds Grenada’s former prime minister Maurice Bishop for his vision and his short-lived attempt to overcome this situation through local linkages between agriculture and tourism.

Employment is also a topic of contention. Despite training, hiring regulations, and union protection, indigenous employees typically receive inadequate compensation. This condition, which stems from a heritage of slavery and colonialism, is reinforced by the dominance of large foreign-owned enterprises.

According to Pattullo the existence of “tourists only” beaches is cause for resentment by many local beach enthusiasts. In addition, the acceptance of Western culture, along with harassment, the drug trade, and the sex industry, dramatizes socioeconomic decline and enhances degradation and illegality. The Caribbean territories are havens for gambling and money laundering activities that are beyond the reach of local authorities.

Tourism is continuously adapting to a diverse clientele. An important aspect of relatively recent origin is ecotourism, with its emphasis on rain forests, national parks and marine reserves. Cuba has 50 areas amounting to 12,000 square kilometers designated for “nature tourism,” Belize attracts foreign investment in lodges and small hotels in areas of natural beauty like Ambergris Cave, and Dominica has its Morne Trois Pitons National Park. Nonetheless the promotion of such ventures is threatened by the destruction of coral reefs, erosion of beaches, pollution from waste material, and construction on wetlands.

Further problems arise as a result of cruise ships. With inexpensive fares and all-inclusive amenities against a backdrop of favorable overhead and port expenditures (and in some instances exclusive privileges through ownership of islands), these giants at sea sustain a skewed relationship at local ports of entry and surrounding outlets, limiting financial benefits to Caribbean retailers, vendors and taxi drivers among others.

After reviewing a number of failed ventures, the author proposes authentic festivals and rituals as themes for successful cultural events. She also favors grassroots tourism in which rural communities and families are integral participants. Examples of this include the Sustainable Communities Foundation in Jamaica, the St. Lucia Heritage Tourism Program, and the Toledo Ecotourism Association of Belize. The effect of such measures would be to increase the tourist sector’s contribution to local infrastructure.

Overall, the book draws on a variety of disciplines and on a rich supply of anecdotes to address usefully a wide range of issues.

Review by Leroy A. Binns
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The Union Institute
labenz@dr.com 


Notes

1. See H. Aage, "Popular Attitudes and Perestroika.” Soviet Studies 43, 1 (January 1991): 3-25.

2. Izvestiia, 28 October 1991, p 1.

3. For an overview, see H. Aage, "The Triumph of Capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe and Its Western Apologetics.” Socialism and Democracy 19, 2 (July 2005): 3-36.

4. The Economist, 26 November 2005, p 33.

5. This is an expanded version of a review that first appeared in Against the Current, Jan./Feb., 2006.

6. Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem.

7. Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism (Vallejo, CA: Veritas Press), 50.

8. Cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1983), 49.

9. Quoted in Schoenman, Hidden History, 31.

10. Quoted in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds., Wrestling with Zion (New York: Grove Press, 2003),  28.

11. Quoted in Schoenman, Hidden History, 34.

12. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, l968), 41.

13. Woody Doane, “Rethinking Whiteness Studies,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 17.

14. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967).

15. An earlier version of her argument, written with Leopoldina Fortunati, was published in 1984: Il Grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale, Milan: Franco Angeli.

16. The imperial fringe was subsidized by Russia, especially with cheap energy -- quite unusual for an empire.

17. If there was a ruling class at all, there were no really rich people in the Soviet Union as there are in western countries and in Russia today. Although comparable to middle-class goods in the west like dachas, cars and traveling abroad, the privileges of the elite profoundly offended the public.

18. Speech to the 27th Congress of the CPSU (Ekonomicheskaia Gazeta, March 1986, No. 10, p. 6).

19. See H. Aage, "Russian Occupational Wages in Transition.” Comparative Economic Studies 38, 4 (Winter 1996), 35-52.

20. P. Reddaway & D. Glinski,  The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace 2001), p. 427.

21. A. Kashepov, "Socioeconomic Determinants of the Demographic Situation in Russia.” Sociological Research 42, 2 (March-April 2003), pp. 11,26.

22. M. Ellman, "Transition: Intended and Unintended Processes.” Comparative Economic Studies 47, 4 (December 2005), p. 609.

23. Reddaway & Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, p. 638.

24. Including three Nobel laureates in two remarkable proclamations to the public in the newspaper Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 1 July 1996, p 1; 9 June 2000, p 3.