Kevin B. Anderson

About the Book “Das Kapital”

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:00:18 +0000

The 2008 Persian edition of Marx’s ‘Capital,’ Vol. I, translated by Hassan Mortazavi with Kaveh Boveiri, is a an important achievement because it has incorporated alternate texts from Marx’s 1872-75 French edition that were ignored by Engels and in most later editions. This interview with Mohsen Hakimi, the translator of Lukács’s ‘The Young Hegel,’ originally appeared on the website Akbar-Rooz.

[video] Marx and the Global South

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:08 +0000

Vijay Prashad, Kevin Anderson and Ananya Mukherjee Reed.

Recorded at the Historical Materialism Conference at York University, Toronto, May 15, 2010.

Historical Materialism 2010 Conference

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 07:00:23 +0000

The conference will take place against the backdrop of a profound destabilization of global capitalism alongside significant challenges for labour and social movements. Imperialist wars abound and culture has been drawn into the service of empire. Robust theorizations and critical innovations are needed.

Plenary Sessions

Thursday, May 13, 5-7 PM

Global Crisis, Working Class Households and Migrant Labour

With Johanna Brenner, Aziz Choudry and David McNally

Friday, May 14, 5:30-7 PM

Is Marxism a Theodicy?

Lecture by Terry Eagleton, with responses by Crystal Bartolovich and Peter Thomas

Saturday, May 15, 3:30 – 5 PM

Conjoint Plenaries:

Historical Materialism and the work of Dorothy Smith
Global Justice Struggles Today

Saturday, May 15, 5:30 – 7 PM

Marxism and the Global South: With Vijay Prashad and Kevin Anderson and response by Himani Bannerji

Sunday, May 16, 2-3:30 PM

Capitalism, Race and Colonialism: With Andrea Smith, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch

Location:

Keele campus

York University

4700 Keele Street

Toronto, Ontario

Canada, M3J 1P3

416-736-2100

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:00:12 +0000

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels espoused an implicitly and problematically unilinear concept of social progress. Precapitalist societies, especially China, which they characterized in ethnocentric terms as a “most barbarian” society, were destined to be forcibly penetrated and modernized by this new and dynamic social system. In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx extended these perspectives to India, while viewing the communal social relations and communal property of the Indian village as a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism.” Postcolonial and postmodern thinkers, most notably Edward Said, have criticized the Communist Manifesto and the 1853 India writings as a form of Orientalist knowledge fundamentally similar to the colonialist mindset.

By 1856-57, the anti-colonialist side of Marx’s thought became more pronounced, as he supported, also in the Tribune, the Chinese resistance to the British during the Second Opium War and the Sepoy Uprising in India. During this period, he began to incorporate some of his new thinking about India into one of his greatest theoretical works, the Grundrisse (1857-58). In this germinal treatise on the critique of political economy, he launched into a truly multilinear theory of history, wherein Asian societies were seen to have developed along a different pathway than that of the successive modes of production he had delineated for Western Europe.

During the 1860s, Marx concentrated on Europe and North America, writing little on Asia. It was in this period that he completed the first version of Capital, Vol. I, as well as most of the drafts of what became Vols. II and III of that work. But he also concerned himself with the dialectics of race and class during the long years of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Although the North was a capitalist society, Marx threw himself into the anti-slavery cause, critically supporting the Lincoln government against the Confederacy within the British and European labor and socialist movements. In his Civil War writings, he argued that white racism had held back labor as a whole, later writing in Capital that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in a black skin it is branded.”

Marx also supported the Polish uprising of 1863, which sought to restore national independence to that long-suffering country. He and his generation of leftists viewed Russia as a malevolent, reactionary power, a form of “Oriental despotism” based in the communal social forms and property relations that predominated in the Russian village. It constituted the biggest threat to Europe’s democratic and socialist movements. Since Russian-occupied Poland stood between Russia proper and Western Europe, Poland’s revolutionary movement represented a deep contradiction within the Russian Empire, one that had hampered its efforts to intervene against the European revolutions of 1830 and initially, those in 1848 as well. As with India and China, by 1858 Marx also began to shift his view of Russia, taking note of the looming emancipation of the serfs and the possibility of an agrarian revolution, as seen in several of his articles on Russia for the Tribune.

The labor and socialist networks that Marx helped to form in Western Europe in support of the U.S. and Poland were crucial to the founding of the First International in 1864. During his years of involvement with the First International Marx focused to a great extent on Ireland. His theorization of Ireland marked the culmination of his writings on ethnicity, race, and nationalism. British workers, he held, were so greatly imbued with nationalist pride and great power arrogance toward the Irish that they had developed a false consciousness, binding them to the dominant classes of Britain, and thus attenuating class conflict within British society. This impasse could be broken only by direct support for Irish national independence on the part of the revolutionary elements within British labor, something that would also serve to reunite labor within Britain, where Irish immigrant labor formed a subproletariat. On more than one occasion, Marx linked his conceptualization of class, ethnicity, and nationalism for the British and the Irish to race relations in the U.S., where he compared the situation of the Irish to the African-Americans. He also compared the attitudes of the British workers toward the Irish to those of the poor whites of the American South, who had too often united with the white planters against their fellow Black workers. In this sense, he was creating a broad dialectical concept of class, race, and ethnicity.

By the 1870s, Marx returned to his earlier preoccupation with Asia, while also deepening his studies of Russia. Whereas he had previously concentrated on Russian foreign policy, he now began to learn Russian in order to study that country’s internal social structure. Marx’s interest in Russia increased with the publication of Capital in Russian in 1872, especially after the book generated more debate there than it had in Germany. Some of the changes Marx introduced into the 1872-75 French edition of Capital concerned the dialectic of capitalist development out of Western feudalism that was at the heart of the book’s part eight, “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” In direct and clear language, Marx now stated that the transition outlined in the part on primitive accumulation applied only to Western Europe. In this sense, the future of Russia was open, was not predetermined by that of Western Europe.

During the years 1879-82, Marx embarked upon a series of excerpt notebooks on scholarly studies on a multifaceted group of non-Western and non-European societies, among them contemporary India, Indonesia (Java), Russia, Algeria, and Latin America. He also made notes on studies of indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. One core theme of these excerpt notebooks was the communal social relations and property forms found in so many of these societies. In his studies of India, for example, two issues emerged. First, his notes indicated a new appreciation of historical development in India, as against his earlier view of that country as a society without history. Although he still saw the communal forms of India’s villages as relatively continuous over the centuries, he now noted a series of important changes within those communal forms. Second, these notes show his preoccupation, not with Indian passivity as in 1853, but with conflict and resistance in the face of foreign conquest, whether against the Muslim conquerors of the medieval period or the British colonialists of his own time. Some of that resistance was, he argued, based upon indigenous communal forms.

If Marx’s theorization of nationalism, ethnicity, and class culminated in his 1869-70 writings on Ireland, those on non-Western societies reached their high point in his 1877-82 reflections on Russia. In a series of letters and their drafts, as well as the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Engels, Marx began to sketch a multilinear theory of social development and of revolution for Russia. Russia’s communal villages were contemporaneous with industrial capitalism in the West. If a village-based social revolution in Russia could draw upon the resources of Western modernity by linking up with a revolution on the part of the Western labor and socialist movements, Russia might be able to modernize in a manner far different from capitalist development, he wrote. Moreover, a revolution in rural Russia could be the “starting point” for such an international revolutionary outbreak, he concluded.

In sum, I argue in this study that Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise. But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity. Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality.

Left Forum 2010

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:00:15 +0000

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: Rekindling the Radical Imagination

The ongoing capitalist crisis generated high hopes that the parties and social movements of the Left, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, would be re-energized. So far this has not happened. The Left remains fractured and confused, drifting away from its labor base, while the Right seems to have emerged as the stronger or at least the more strident force. The result is that unemployment remains high, wages low, and insecurity grows. In the U.S., the Obama administration negotiates from the center, and concedes more and more to business interests and political conservatives. Can this be turned around? Can the hardships and opportunities generated by the capitalist crisis yet become the trigger for the revival of a transformative Left?

Kevin Anderson will be speaking on panels humanism and Marxism, Marx’s concept of socialism, and the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.

March 19-21
Pace University, One Pace Plaza
New York, NY 10038

Full Three-Day Registration – early registration $50/$70 after early registration (reg.) discounts end* and at the door

Low-income Registration – early registration $30*/$40* after early reg. discounts end/ and at door

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Low-income One-Day Registration (Sat. or Sun.) – early registration $20/$30 after early reg. discounts end/at door

Pace University Registration – $15 (With current Pace I.D. only)

Panelists and Panel organizers: register for conference via one of the categories above

REGISTER

Der Obama-Effekt untergräbt die Linke

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:28 +0000

Interview by Simon Birnbaum with Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson [Published in German as “Der Obama-Effekt untergräbt die Linke,” iz3w No. 317 (Freiburg, March-April 2010), pp. 33-35]

Link >>>

pdf file

The Obama Effect Undermines the Left

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:00:19 +0000

1. It is evident that Obama will not work for the global abolition of capitalism. But did or do you though pin hopes on his foreign policy?

Peter Hudis:

I did not pin much hope on Obama’s foreign policy, since it is important to remember that since becoming a professional politician he has not identified with progressive or leftist causes; in fact, it would be highly inaccurate to even label him a liberal. His political career has consistently displayed the tendency to tack towards the center and avoid the politics of confrontation. True, he is a breath of fresh air compared to Bush, and his election did represent an important shift in race relations, given the persistent racism that has long defined U.S. society. However, Obama’s entire career has represented an effort to integrate into and become accepted by mainstream elements of U.S. society, not to challenge them. He made no secret of this in the way he opposed the war in Iraq while doing nothing to challenge traditional U.S. policy on such matters as Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, relations with Latin America, gays in the military, and even the level of funds committed by the U.S. to combat AIDS overseas (he has promised much less than what Bush had committed).

It is also important to keep in mind that for Obama to act differently on foreign policy would require him to directly challenge and oppose the U.S. national security establishment. Iraq is no longer a defining issue for the national security establishment; the consensus among it (and much of the U.S. public) is that the troop surge in Iraq was a success and that the war will be drawn down of its own accord. But this in no way implies that the U.S. national security establishment is any less interested in promoting the U.S. drive for single world domination that it was during the Bush years. Gen. McCrystal, who is largely directing the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, went out of his way to publicly argue for the troop buildup in Afghanistan, even going so far as to insist on increasing troop levels in discussions with NATO before discussing the matter with Obama. The U.S. military did not work hard to try to turn things around in Iraq in order to now declare failure in Afghanistan. That issue of power and prestige, far more than anything else, explains the decision to send over 30,000 more U.S. troops to a country that (by the military’s own estimate) contains less than 100 Al Qaeda fighters. For Obama to oppose the military’s demand for a significant build-up of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would have required him to directly oppose the agenda of the very powerful part of the U.S. establishment. Yet everything in his political biography prior to the elections, as well as everything he has done since then, indicates that he is adverse to any such approach. He is an accommodator and a compromiser, not a fighter—even for principles that he fervently believes in, let alone those he does not.

There is another objective component that constrains Obama’s actions in foreign policy—the depth of the economic crisis. His trip to Beijing late last year was striking both for his obsequious effort to ingratiate himself with Chinese leaders and avoid any substantive call for the release of political prisoners and respect for human rights on the part of the Chinese government. Compare Obama’s actions to Bush, who had refused to even grant an official state dinner to Hu Jintao when he came to visit Washington during his second term and was not averse to openly criticizing its government from time to time. Obama feels he cannot afford to treat the Chinese leadership in such a manner, given the need for continued Chinese financing of the ballooning federal budget and trade deficits.

None of this is to deny that Obama has done much to redress the unilateral and hateful rhetoric of the Bush administration, a fact that has done much to generate intense hopes for him and his administration among people around the world. However, as I see it his approach represents recognition on the part of a substantial section of the ruling elite that the image Bush and Cheney projected in insisting “all who are not with us are against us” proved counter-productive to promoting U.S. interests. Just as it was the opposition of the military establishment and moderate Republicans that called a halt to Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s, so much of the U.S. ruling class has decided that Bush and Cheney’s approach was undermining their very aims. But important as is the shift in terms of language and expression, there is little evidence that Obama has ever been at odds with the basic aims of the establishment that he is now the leader of.

The real challenge that the Left faces in the U.S. today is to stake out a principled ground against Obama’s policies at the same time as it makes it clear that the greatest threat facing the country today is the growing power of the racist Right, which is helping to infuse the Republican Party with a populist, reactionary agenda. Their effort to paint Obama as part of a “liberal” elite out of touch with the interests of the “common man” is deeply threatening in light of the state of the economy and the extremely high levels of employment. No matter what Obama does on the foreign policy front, he will face a growing and increasingly mobilized Right that at the moment is far better organized, unified, and mobilized than are liberals or leftists.

2. If I summarize correctly, Peter, you are more or less saying, the only change so far in U.S. foreign policy after Bush has concerned rhetoric. Let’s first have a look on this in a larger perspective: Is it not an aim of the Obama administration – to good or bad account – to remove foreign policy from the neoconservative approach, which especially meant – ideologically – bringing freedom and democracy in the world, and – practically – waging or supporting wars in several parts of the world, all this in an unilateral way?

Peter Hudis:

I would not go as far as say that Obama has made only “rhetorical” changes in U.S. foreign policy. In several speeches he has tried to address the Muslim world in an understanding way, which is quite unprecedented for a U.S. president. While such advances have been mainly verbal, words do have substance in attempting to generate a less tense global environment. On the gist of your question, I do think that Obama wants to move away from major aspects of the neo-conservative approach to foreign policy, since he is less of a unilateralist than Bush and realizes that the projection of U.S. power has to be exerted with greater care. However, I do not think that “bringing freedom and democracy to the world” was ever a part of the neoconservative project. Such claims on their part were pure rhetoric that lacked any substance. If Bush was interested in “bringing freedom and democracy” to the world he wouldn’t have supported Musharaff’s dictatorship in Pakistan and the Saudi monarchy as forcefully as he did. It must not be overlooked that the neocons latched onto the rhetoric of “democracy and freedom” only relatively late in the Bush tenure, after it had become clear that the claim of there being “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq proved to be a mirage. And there were already signs near the end of Bush’s tenure that the administration realized that pursuing its aims through strict unilateralism was proving counter-productive. Obama’s foreign policy represents a further distancing from the crude unilateralism of the original Bush approach, without breaking fundamentally from its overall mission and aims.

Kevin Anderson:

Obama represents some changes to the face of the ruling classes of the U.S. and its empire. On a general level, he is part of the more pragmatist, realist wing of the dominant classes. Moreover, many elements of these classes thought his ethnicity and his international ties to Africa through his family would be a plus after the Bush years, which antagonized even U.S. allies and gave opponents of the U.S. a good “target” against whom to mobilize people.

The results have been very limited so far, however. Probably the best example of the slight change Obama represents could be seen in his Cairo speech addressed to the Muslim world, where he set a different tone from Bush. In addition, he made some small noises critical of Israel, although in the end he did absolutely nothing about Netanyahu’s defiance of his demand that Israel freeze the settlements during negotiations. While he remains very unpopular in Israel, he has in fact not been all that critical. He was silent, for example, during the Gaza War a year ago just as he was about to assume the presidency.

Moreover, he has escalated sharply the war in Afghanistan and the number of attacks inside Pakistan on Al Qaeda and Taliban elements. While some on the Left claim to be shocked or disappointed, in fact this should not surprise anyone, as he campaigned on the concept of getting out of Iraq not from a pacifist position, but in order to concentrate on the “real” war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nonetheless, many on the Left harbored illusions about Obama. Where he has failed to fulfill even his small campaign promises about breaking with the Bush period of aggressive warfare is on Iraq. There is no sign of any serious withdrawal and it is notable that Obama kept Bush’s Defense (really war) Secretary, Robert Gates, in place.

With regard to Latin America, again there have been some very small changes, most notably a slight toning down of the confrontation with Cuba. But little has come of this, as Obama’s policy is not really that different from that of the U.S. over the past 50 years. The tragic events in Honduras show that fundamentally there is no change from Bush. While Obama engaged in a pro forma criticism of the coup government, nothing serious was done to stop it. Moreover, he undermined the efforts of a united Latin America to confront the coup government by saying that the U.S. would not rule out accepting the results of an election called by the coup government. This election has now happened, whereas even a phone call in serious tone from the U.S. government could have forced a compromise in a very small country like Honduras with its long ties to U.S. state and military interests. Honduras was, after all, the base for Reagan’s Contra War against revolutionary Nicaragua during the 1980s, when it was called a “giant American aircraft carrier.”

On Iran, his more realist and less confrontational policy has actually undermined the regime, making it harder for them to mobilize support on the basis of a threat from the U.S. But his policy of course offers no answer to the real problems of Iran or the region. As a whole, Obama represents a slightly more benign face for the U.S. Empire, but there is not a fundamental change, and not even too many small changes. He has come to office at a time when the U.S. is weakened internationally, not only because of its disastrous wars, but also because the global economic crisis is centered in the U.S., which has given new power to China and other powers.

If the Nobel Prize represents a somewhat illusory hope that he would really work for peace, it also shows just how anxious the world was to get out from under the Bush administration. At the same time, the Obama effect has undermined the U.S. and the global Left, by giving it less of a clear target, especially on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Left also remains very confused about how to oppose the war in Afghanistan and at the same time, stand opposed the reactionary fundamentalism of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Mostly, the Left has confined itself to generalities about ending the war, without dealing with the fact that a return of the Taliban would certainly not improve the lives of the people of Afghanistan. This, along with the Obama effect, seems to have given the global Left pause, as can be seen in the surprising lack of antiwar demonstrations during the entirety of the year 2009. The only exception was the war over Gaza a year ago, but those demonstrations did not deal with Iraq or Afghanistan very much.

3. Isn’t there even a change in U.S. foreign policy, which is in complete contrast to the euphoric view by large parts of the global audience? As you indicated already, Kevin: Against the background of the economic crisis Obama’s government e. g. seems to look for a closing of ranks with China – not being so much concentrated on human rights -, economic protectionism is on the agenda – “Buy American” – and global environmental protection seems to be much less important than proclaimed before.

Kevin Anderson:

U.S. foreign policy has evolved somewhat from the grand illusions of the years 2001-03, according to which the U.S. could have reshaped the Middle East (and perhaps even North Korea!) through regime change by military means. But that evolution did not begin with Obama; it had already begun in the last years of the Bush administration, during which the U.S. was forced to accept a semi-fundamentalist Shia Muslim governing group hostile to Israel rather than neoliberal pro-Israel one in Iraq. This followed as a consequence of the fact that the Iraq war – despite a partial turnaround in the last year or so – constitutes the greatest military disaster for the U.S. since Vietnam. The change was expressed in part by the replacement of the flamboyantly militaristic Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense by the dull and bureaucratic Robert Gates. The fact that Gates continues under Obama in the same position underscores that the change from the Bush era has been largely incremental. Of course, all of this is conditioned by the fact that in addition to the U.S.’s isolation abroad, which came earlier, even at home the U.S. public is fed up with military adventurism and economically, the U.S. has been drained by both war and economic crisis. Obama has continued the evolution that began late in the Bush administration, pulling back a bit further on some fronts. One of the clearest shifts from the Bush era can seen in the fact that Obama has taken a more “realist” position on Iran, where he has toned down the threats of an armed attack by the U.S. or the encouragement of an Israeli one.

4. Kevin, you mentioned “the Obama effect” on the U.S. and global Left and also the confusion of this Left. Under Bush even many radical leftist groups, also in the U.S., concentrated on a simplistic anti-Bushism, often combined with anti-Americanism, cultural relativism, and even anti-Semitism. Ideologies are not eliminated with a new president, but can you observe a more objective debate within the (radical) left now, maybe also against the background of disillusionment about Obama? Which are in your opinion – if there are – interesting groups and voices concerning critique of the current U.S. foreign policy?

Kevin Anderson:

I haven’t yet seen much of this type of rethinking in recent months in terms of Afghanistan or Iraq, although it may happen now that the focus has turned to Afghanistan and Pakistan. I think most people on the Left developed their positions 5 or more years ago and have become entrenched, with some falling into the simplistic type of anti-imperialism you mention above and others taking a much more critical position toward the Taliban, Iraqi fundamentalist resistance, etc. within their concept of anti-imperialism. Among the latter are organizations and publications like Campaign for Peace and Democracy, ZNet, Bill Weinberg’s World War 4 Report, and the U.S. Marxist-Humanists, with Peter and I affiliated with the latter. Disillusionment with Obama means that both types of Left will increasingly target him directly, but that alone will not necessarily lead to a more critical form of anti-imperialism.

There has been a lot of heated debate during the past 6 months over the Iranian democratic movement, however, a somewhat related issue. From the beginning of the mass anti-election protests, some crude anti-imperialists debunked the movement as a middle class or elite Western-educated fringe while claiming that Ahmadinejad had actually won. James Petras, a well-known sociologist of Latin America, penned the most blatant of these attempts, and many more were influenced by Hugo Chavez’s deplorable embrace of Ahmadinejad. Even the respected journal Monthly Review gave a lot of space to such positions on its website, prompting the resignation of Barbara Epstein, one of that journal’s best-known editors. In the debate over Iran, however, the critical part of the U.S. Left was in a stronger position. Almost all of the leftist Iranian intellectuals – both at home and abroad – supported the protest movement, and even intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, who had played down their critique of the Taliban or Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001, signed statements supporting the Iranian protests or at least calling for an end to their brutal repression. More comprehensive statements of support and analysis came from within the critical anti-imperialist tendencies I mentioned above. See for example our international Marxist-Humanist statement from last fall, “Support the Iranian People’s Movement against the Repressive Regime!” See also Frieda Afary’s blog, “Iranian Progressives in Translation” one of many sources from within the Iranian community that are influencing the U.S. Left.

5. And what about the peace movement on the occasion of the “war on terror”? At the beginning of the war in Iraq it was also in the U.S. a mass-movement, but I think – as all over the world – mainly characterized by this annoying mixture of the ideologies mentioned above. Nevertheless many people from the Democratic Party-range were also part of this movement, and made sometimes their first experiences with state violence. Is there anything left of this movement besides the already mentioned confusion within the radical left? Are there still anti-war-demonstrations etc.? Is there any spirit left of this movement within mainstream parts of society?

Peter Hudis:

You are correct that a massive, albeit shortlived, movement against war arose in 2002 and 2003 over Bush’s designs on Iraq, and the protests did contain a large variety of people from different backgrounds. However, when it became clear that Bush would not listen to any critics of his Iraq adventure, the size and scale of the protests dropped off dramatically. By the last few years, there was little or nothing of an anti-war movement left to speak of in the U.S. although occasional rallies and marches were held by groupings of the traditional Left. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign led many opponents of the war to put their faith in his election instead of attempting to build or revive active anti-war protests. However, in the past several months there are signs of a renewal of anti-war activities. Many Obama supporters have been shocked by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and a number of rallies are planned for this spring. The problem these efforts still face, however, is the need to oppose the U.S. military buildup without making apologies for the Taliban or ignoring the still very real threat of terrorist attacks on the U.S. and elsewhere. For the most part, the anti-war Left has not found a way to deal with both sides of that contradiction.

6. Are there any beginnings of “alternative foreign policy” by the proletarian movement within or besides the familiar marginal groups like the industrial workers of the world on the one, more radical hand, and the official trade unions on the other, more reformist hand?

There have been some efforts along these lines, although they form a minority position within the leftist and antiwar movements. Groups like U.S. Labor Against the War have both opposed the war/occupation of Iraq and supported Iraqi union. They have supported these new independent unions against repression from the U.S./Iraq governments on the one hand, and from fundamentalist groups that have targeted them on the other.
Concerning Afghanistan, where the labor movement is not well developed, there have been similar efforts for years to support secular feminist groups like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) while also opposing the U.S./NATO war. These issues are coming to the fore again as a result of the escalation of the war in Afghanistan by both the U.S./NATO forces and the Taliban, and the spilling over of the conflict into Pakistan.
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy, mentioned above, will soon issue a statement criticizing the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and has previously issued a statement against war that mentions prominently the danger of the Taliban. Marxist-Humanists based in the U.S. and other countries will soon be issuing a collective statement about the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that will seriously analyze the fundamentalist threat, while of course devoting most of its space to a critique of war and militarism.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Interview by Simon Birnbaum with Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson [Published in German as “Der Obama-Effekt untergräbt die Linke,” iz3w No. 317 (Freiburg, March-April 2010), pp. 33-35]

New Books for 2010

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:00:24 +0000

“Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies”

A Note on Marx’s Relationship to Engels
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
Chapter 2: Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
Chapter 3: Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
Chapter 4: Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
Chapter 5: From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
Chapter 6: Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix: The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), from the 1920s to Today
References
Index

(See below for more detailed table of contents.)

Description:

From the “Grundrisse” to “Capital”: Multilinear Themes

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:00:02 +0000

In the Grundrisse (1857-58), Marx sketches a multilinear theory of history. This marks an important turn in his thought. These themes are taken up again and developed further in Capital, Vol. I (1872-75), but as a theorization of contemporary possibilities rather than past history.

[audio] Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:09 +0000

Report by Fred Nguyen

Kevin B. Anderson

About the Book “Das Kapital”

[video] Marx and the Global South

Historical Materialism 2010 Conference

Plenary Sessions

Location:

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Left Forum 2010

Der Obama-Effekt untergräbt die Linke

The Obama Effect Undermines the Left

New Books for 2010

“Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies”

Table of Contents:

Description:

Table of Contents:

From the “Grundrisse” to “Capital”: Multilinear Themes

[audio] Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies