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International Socialist Review Issue 47,
May–June 2006


LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Our cover feature focuses on the explosion of a new movement for immigrant rights onto the national scene. The three articles by Justin Akers Chacón not only explain the movement and the debates that have begun to emerge around it, but provide detailed information on some of the key congressional immigration bills (which are variations of bad), as well as a background on the bipartisan backlash against immigrants that has preceded the movement’s emergence. The movement is a rebuff to the one-sided class war that American employers have sustained over the last two decades, opening up politics from the bottom up in a way not seen in decades. However long the movement continues, it will have a lasting effect that reach far beyond the immigrant communities in the United States.

The antiwar movement, whose level of struggle has been low in relation to the growing majority sentiment against the Iraq war, should take some pointers from the immigration fight back. But it is not the only one. The new immigrant rights movement throws painfully into relief the weak, effectively nonexistent, state of the abortion rights movement as well. Sherry Wolf’s opening report on the assault on abortion rights tells the tale of how, shamefully, the organizations that traditionally could be relied on to promote a woman’s right to choose are so hopelessly tied to the Democrats, who have led a systematic retreat in the face of the right wing, that they have abandoned the field of struggle at a time when mass resistance is both needed and entirely possible.

Jessie Kindig sends us a report of the great victory in France—several weeks of mass strikes and protests of young students and workers that forced the government to back down from its plan to make it easier for employers to fire young workers. In a Europe attempting to impose the “American plan”—low wages, weak benefits, and “flexible” labor—the struggle is a milestone for the European working class.

“The problem is that our policy has been all carrot and no stick.” With that statement, a senior Bush foreign policy adviser indicates the administration’s intention at some undisclosed future date to go after Iran for having the audacity to develop a nuclear program. In the first installment of a two-part interview with David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky turns the tables and explains why the United States, rather than Iran, is the “outlaw state.” In a wide-ranging discussion of American military and economic hubris, Chomsky provides some important background to the Iran crisis, exposing the complete hypocrisy with which Washington conducts its overseas business.

Anthony Arnove’s “The new white man’s burden,” a chapter from his new book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, offers an insightful historical background to the rise of American imperialism, examining the parallels between U.S. actions today and the period of its emergence in the late nineteenth century as a world power.

Joe Allen, author of a three-part series on the Vietnam War for the ISR in previous issues, tackles an important question that is almost completely hidden from view—the death penalty in the U.S. military.

Socialists are sometimes accused of all sorts of things when they involve themselves in struggle; not only from employers who use the slander of “outside agitator” to short-circuit radical influences on the working class, but also from liberals and other activists who accuse them of having an “agenda,” or wanting only to “recruit” for “their” cause. ISR associate editor Joel Geier not only takes on these types of accusations, but he explains the crucial, positive role that socialists play in both building and leading struggle as well as connecting today’s struggles to a more thorough-going transformation of society in the future.

In our “What do socialists say?” series, Elizabeth Terzakis tackles what is perhaps the most common argument leveled against the possibility of socialism—that human nature won’t permit it. Debunking, with generous examples, the idea that human nature is some fixed entity, she shows how in practice human behavior is as much cooperative as it is competitive.

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