Western Imperialism and the Role of Sub-imperialism in the Global South
At first blush, Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president brings respite from a world threatened by Donald Trump’s climate-denialist, dictator-coddling, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, rules-breaking regime. On second thought, 2021 will also initiate an unwelcome restoration of legitimacy to Western imperialism akin to Barack Obama’s rule. Biden’s (2020) recent
Foreign Affairs article began by stressing how since 2017, “the international system that the United States so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams.” In reconstructing imperialism, Biden may draw upon a legislative and public-advocacy record dating to the 1980s, based upon consistent service to several internationally ambitious circuits of U.S. capital:
Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in
Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences, that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In
Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community.
Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in th
January 7, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project The death of Leo Panitch has made the world a darker place. His writings have carried us through some of the most difficult periods in the history of the socialist left, as wave after wave of the neoliberal onslaught broke workers’ organizations, serving up one defeat after the next. Leo’s work sustained so many of us during these years, pushing us on and pointing the way through the storm.
This was not because he sowed illusions about just how bad things have been. Rather it was because, even as other erstwhile New Leftists lamented the “God That Failed,” he devoted himself to demonstrating the necessity of a democratic socialist society that would neither fall prey to the shortcomings of social democracy nor those of Soviet-style Communism.
January 7, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Verso The sudden death our friend and comrade Leo Panitch has led to an extraordinary outpouring of sadness and appreciation across the world. Very few intellectuals on the left have had the intellectual impact on progressive thinkers and activists that Leo has had, as the flood of testimonials shows; and fewer still have in addition personally trained a comparable network of scholars of the highest calibre who are now carrying forward his distinctive project of critical – and self-critical – research and teaching in dozens of countries. Leo also combined research and teaching with engagement with activists in parties, trade unions and social movements: he knew and was consulted by leaders on the left in several continents, but was also known and admired by the rank and file who flocked to meetings whenever he showed up in Johannesburg, Athens, Frankfurt, London, Rio, New Delhi and elsewh
In Appreciation of Leo Panitch
The sudden death our friend and comrade Leo Panitch has led to an extraordinary outpouring of sadness and appreciation across the world. Very few intellectuals on the left have had the intellectual impact on progressive thinkers and activists that Leo has had, as the flood of testimonials shows; and fewer still have in addition personally trained a comparable network of scholars of the highest calibre who are now carrying forward his distinctive project of critical – and self-critical – research and teaching in dozens of countries. Leo also combined research and teaching with engagement with activists in parties, trade unions and social movements: he knew and was consulted by leaders on the left in several continents, but was also known and admired by the rank and file who flocked to meetings whenever he showed up in Johannesburg, Athens, Frankfurt, London, Rio, New Delhi and elsewhere.