An excellent May-June issue of New Left Review contains several strong articles. They include a fabulous interview of Rashid Khalidi, editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, conducted by the veteran socialist activist and writer Tariq Ali. The discussion goes far beyond simply addressing the current horrors in Gaza to explore the longer history of Palestinian resistance, Israeli apartheid and the role of imperialism in the region.
The same issue contains a piece on Mexico by Tony Wood, following the landslide victory of Claudia Sheinbaum in June’s presidential elections. Sheinbaum is the successor of the left-leaning president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) and a member of the same Morena party. Wood identifies the rise of Morena as a type of aftershock of the “pink tide” that brought left-nationalist governments of varying degrees of radicalism to power in Latin American, starting with Hugo Chávez’s election in Venezuela in 1998.
The early pink tide governments tended to benefit from export earnings due to the commodities super-cycle of the 2000s. In some ways, AMLO fits better with the experiences of what is sometimes called the “Pink Tide 2.0”, more recent governments which enjoy less economic leeway than their predecessors. Yet, Sheinbaum has a strong mandate, winning 36 million votes, 60 percent of the total. How she navigates the tensions of attempting to reform a deeply class-divided and unequal Mexico, remains to be seen, but Wood provides valuable context.
In a similar vein, on New Left Review’s blog, Sidecar, left-wing sociologist Gabriel Hetland has produced a commentary on July’s Venezuelan election, in which Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed victory (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fraud-foretold). Hetland acknowledges the attempts by the Venezuelan ruling class, its political representatives at home and its allies abroad, to overthrow Chavista governments and manipulate previous polls (he was himself an observer for the 2015 parliamentary elections). However, he makes clear that this does not preclude fraud having been committed by Maduro’s PSUV party—and that the explosion of protests by the poor in the wake of the election reinforces his point that support for the president has declined sharply.
This reflects the inability of Maduro to overcome the economic collapse precipitated by declining oil revenue, sanctions by the United States and European Union, and rampant inflation. Instead, the regime has sought foreign investment in extractive industries while increasingly relying on repression to maintain control—including repression of workers and the left. It is this that has created the space for right-wing parties to challenge for power again in Venezuela.
Christos Balomenos has offered an interesting piece for Capital nerds, “Did Engels’ Editing of Capital, Volume 3 Distort Marx’s Analysis of the ‘Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’?”, available from the academic journal Capital & Class for those with access (https://doi.org/10.1177/03098168241269037). In it, he considers the longstanding debate about the degree to which Frederick Engels’s editing of Karl Marx’s unfinished manuscripts for the later volumes of Capital (only the first volume appeared during the author’s lifetime) affected the analysis. Many authors in this journal have, over the years, suggested that Engels gets a raw deal, having had little option but to try to impose order on Marx’s voluminous but sometimes chaotic drafts—and nobody was closer to Marx intellectually than his close friend and comrade, his “alter-ego”.
Balomenos offers some textual support for such a view, focusing on the specific issue of Marx’s “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, outlined in the third volume of Capital. A detailed analysis of the manuscripts compiled for the German MEGA project suggests that Engels’s editing did not significantly alter the meaning or structure of Marx’s work. Rather, it probably reflected the kind of process Marx would himself have undertaken if he were preparing the manuscript for publication, and which he did undertake in the case of the first volume.
Anne Alexander, a member of our editorial board, has played a central role in our chronicling of the struggles of Palestinians against Israeli oppression, and in exploring the dynamics of imperialism and class division across the wider region. A piece by her for the Irish website Rebel, run by the Socialist Workers Network, picks up the threads of our ongoing analysis, exploring the potential for a regional war as Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal attack on Gaza continues (https://www.rebelnews.ie/2024/08/17/from-%20war-to-revolution-in-the-middle-east/).
JC