On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass—a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president under the elder Bush, soon to be appointed director of policy planning in the State Department of newly elected President George W. Bush—delivered a paper in Atlanta entitled “Imperial America.” For the United States to succeed at […]
Tag Archives | Spanish
The Rediscovery of Imperialism
The concept of “imperialism” was considered outside the acceptable range of political discourse within the ruling circles of the capitalist world for most of the twentieth century. Reference to “imperialism” during the Vietnam War, no matter how realistic, was almost always a sign that the writer was on the left side of the political spectrum. […]
Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism
”Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism,” in Doug Dowd, ed., Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 132-50. Translations: Spanish translation in Doug Dowd, ed., Entender el capitalismo Hacienda, 2006.
Imperialism and ‘Empire’
Only a little more than a month ago at this writing, before September 11, the mass revolt against capitalist globalization that began in Seattle in November 1999 and that was still gathering force as recently as Genoa in July 2001 was exposing the contradictions of the system in a way not seen for many years. […]
The Age of Planetary Crisis
The final years of the twentieth century have revealed three critical conditions likely to dominate the history of the coming century: (1) economic stagnation and globalization; (2) environmental decline; and (3) the weakness of antisystemic movements. As economic conditions stagnate and environmental conditions worsen, the material bases will emerge for a new, much broader movement […]
Marx and the Environment
It has become fashionable in recent years, in the words of one critic, to identify the growth of ecological consciousness with “the current postmodernist interrogation of the metanarrative of the Enlightenment.” Green thinking, we are frequently told, is distinguished by its postmodern, post-Enlightenment perspective. Nowhere is this fashion more evident than in certain criticisms directed […]
The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism
James O’Connor has asked us to consider the relationship between what he has termed the “first and second contradictions” of capitalism. I would like to refer to the first contradiction, following Marx, as ‘the absolute cereal law of capitalist accumulation.” The second contradiction may then be designated as “the absolute general law of environmental degradation […]