ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
Letter from the editors
THE GROWING opposition to the occupation in Iraq still
has not found expression in a mass movement. But that doesn’t mean
there isn’t organization and resistance. Our cover story looks at the
speeches of several members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) who
explain how their experiences in Iraq convinced them to oppose the
occupation and join IVAW. “It’s not going to be Congress or the
government that ends the war,” Adrienne Kinne tells us, “but
people speaking out and taking a stance against the war that’s going
to end it.” Dahr Jamail’s report on the Winter Soldier event in
Seattle praises its vibrancy, and the fact that the 800-strong event was
organized by a broad coalition of forces, ending with a march through
Seattle.
Complementing the above articles is a speech by Ashley
Smith that reviews the state of the antiwar movement and offers some ideas
on how to take it forward. “Today we must seize every opportunity to
educate, organize, and act locally to establish vehicles to mobilize the
growing sentiment for change,” he concludes. “We must do so
with the determination to provide an alternative means for winning change
when the Democrats either fail to deliver or deliver inadequate solutions
to the various crises we will confront.”
Lance Selfa’s analysis of Barack Obama’s
presidential run argues that it is historically unprecedented, and that his
support reflects a desire for genuine change that the Left should welcome;
but his supporters should expect to be disappointed by what he can actually
deliver.
In May, while Israel celebrated its sixtieth
anniversary, Palestinians marched and demonstrated to commemorate the
sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba—their mass expulsion from Palestine
to make way for Israel’s founding. Paul D’Amato describes the
Nakba, and explains why it continues today.
Lee Wengraf looks at how the world’s major
powers, in their efforts to find and control sources of oil, are in the
throes of a new “scramble for Africa,” and how that scramble is
reshaping the political economy of the world’s poorest continent.
Phil Gasper’s regular column, “Critical Thinking,” asks
why the price of oil is so high, and what it tells us about the state of
capitalism today. In a related analysis, Lee Sustar looks at recent claims
that the economic crisis that began with the mortgage meltdown is receding,
noting that there is much to the contrary.
As part of our ongoing series on 1968, we reprint here
an excerpt from Joe Allen’s new book, Vietnam:
The (Last) War the U.S. Lost, covering the rise
of Robert F. Kennedy to the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention,
where Mayor Daley’s thugs in blue wreaked havoc on peaceful
protesters while the whole world watched. Accompanying Joe’s article
are interviews with two participants in the Chicago ’68 events.
We also present the second, and final, installment of
Amy Muldoon’s review of Trotsky’s classic, History of the Russian Revolution, newly
republished by Haymarket Books. “Trotsky’s motivation in
writing History of
the Russian
Revolution,” Muldoon writes, “was to
translate the experience of the revolution into both a teaching tool for
revolutionaries and a weapon in the battle against Stalinism.”
Lenin’s What Is to Be
Done? is almost universally misrepresented
as Lenin’s “elitist” break from orthodox Marxism, the
point where he lost “faith” in the Russian working class. Paul
D’Amato debunks these claims, arguing that Lenin’s little book
is full of confidence in the workers and doubt about the ability of the
intelligentsia to rise to their level.
For our featured review, Sarah Hines analyses a new
Verso book by Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics, on the last several years of mass revolt in Bolivia,
examining the authors’ claim that it constitutes a “social
revolution.”