Jottings on the conjuncture

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 48, 2007, Pages 5-37

  Anderson, Perry ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38349044003     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. The size of Iraq's unexplored reserves, a still uncertain multiple of the country's output, may have loomed larger in long-range thinking about the war, as Greenspan has implied.
2. Ermattungsstrategie: 'strategy of attrition'; Niederwerfungsstrategie: 'strategy of overthrow'-terms coined by the German military historian Hans Delbrück, a decade after the Franco-Prussian War. For their political uses, see 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci', NLR I/IOO, November-December 1976, pp. 61-70.
3. The outstanding work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has finally broken this silence: first with their essay, 'The Israel Lobby', London Review of Books, 23 March 2006, then with the book that has succeeded it, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, New York 2007. See also Michael Massing's well-documented account, 'The Storm over the Israel Lobby', New York Review of Books, 8 June 2006. In striking contrast has been the general pusillanimity of the American Left, prone to emphasizing the role of its bugbear the Christian Right as a more acceptable culprit, when the letter's function has clearly been in effect a force d'appoint. Israeli politicians are more robust, Olmert straightforwardly describing 'the Jewish organizations' as Our power base in America': Financial Times, 30 November 2007.
4. Within days of the attack, Fredric Jameson was pointing this out: 'Historical events are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves', London Review of Books, 4 October 2001. For his full argument, see 'The Dialectics of Disaster', South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 297-304.
5. See Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, London and New York 2005, pp. 9-10.
6. See the judgement of Ali Allawi, Minister of Finance under the American occupation, not one inclined to minimize the tyranny of the regime: 'The Ba'ath Party had over two million members by the time the regime was overthrown. But it was by no means exclusively, or even predominantly, Sunni Arab. Shi'a, and even Turkomen and a few Kurds were well represented throughout the Party structure'-though, of course, 'the Party's upper echelons, and its key organizational and security units, were disproportionately Sunni Arab.' He concludes: 'It is insufficient to equate its years in power with the calamities that had befallen Iraq. The Ba'ath Party had metamorphosed into something else. It became a symbolic shorthand that covered more complex loyalties': Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, New Haven 2007, pp. 148-9.
7. For a cogently argued case, if tinged with a final irony, that such an outcome would be an optimal arrangement for the us, see Jim Holt, 'It's the Oil!', London Review of Books, 18 October 2007.
8. For this distinction, see Stephen Gill's penetrating essay 'A Neo-Gramscian Approach to European Integration', in Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, eds, A Ruined Fortress? Neo-Liberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe, Lanham 2003.
9. See, respectively, 'Plan for a Global Pension', NLR 47, Sept-Oct 2007, pp. 71-92, and How to Democratize the European Union. . . and Why Bother?, Lanham 2000, pp. 44-6.
10. See, most recently, What Should the Left Propose?, London and New York 2006; and for the case on crises, False Necessity, London and New York 2004, pp. 540-6.
11. The Great Transformation, London 1944, pp. 72-3.
12. For these estimates, see Richard Freeman, 'What Really Ails Europe (and America): the Doubling of the Global Workforce', The Globalist, 3 June 2005. Freeman, a leading Harvard economist, directs the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
13. 'History's Postman', London Review of Books, 26 January 2006. Other key texts include Out of the Cage', 'Make for the Boondocks', 'Democratic Warming' and 'The Enabling Boundary': LRB, 24 June 2004, 5 May 2005, 4 August 2005, 18 October 2007, and 'America: Enemy of Globalization', open Democracy, 2003.
14. Multitude, New York 2005, p. 358.
15. See Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge 2003.
16. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, London and New York 2007, pp. 7-8.
17. 'The Limits of Multitude', NLR 35, September-October 2005, pp. 19-39; sequel in 'States of Failure', NLR 40, July-August 2006. Subsequent texts: 'Vectors of the Biopolitical', NLR 45, May-June 2007, and "The Catastrophist', London Review of Books, 1 November 2007.
18. The major difference between Empire and Multitude is the casting down of the idol of the US Republic in the latter.