The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005

"The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005" by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (editors) brilliantly explores themes pertaining to finance, culture and the impact of U.S. imperialism around the world. The penetrating analyses offered by the sixteen outstanding writers in this collection makes a powerful statement about the Socialist movement's continued relevance in our increasingly fractured world. The first two articles describe how globalization has been constructed through U.S. imperialism. Varda Burstyn's article draws inspiration from the works of several great Socialist writers from the past to find their ideas operative in the present. Burstyn connects President George W. Bush's shifting political alliances and doublespeak with the work of George Orwell; similarly, Burstyn finds that the bioscience and pharmaceutical industry's work towards engineering and pacifying the privileged classes had previously been imagined by Aldous Huxley. Stephen Gill explains how U.S. military and political power has been used to control international trade but believes that deficits resulting from imperial overstretch and growing negative public opinion might signal a turning point against the U.S. Two works focus on the U.S.' domination of the post-World War II financial system. Interestingly, both Panitch and Gindin's and Christopher Rude's articles find that crisis has served as an integral component in the financial system's ability to discipline both labor and recalcitrant governments. Contrasting the institutional protections that have been built for financiers with the insecurities of the working class, the authors believe that increasing inequality and political illegitimacy may open the door for popular anti-capitalist movements to emerge. Several articles explored the relationship between the media and ideology. Scott Forsyth suggests that the Hollywood action film's promotion of the U.S. engaging in a 'good war' is becoming an increasingly difficult idea to sell to the rest of the world. Yuezhi Zhao traces the Chinese State's embrace of corporate news and entertainment to the class alliance between transnational capitalists and China's ruling elite, which in turn has led to a culture of consumption that has left vast numbers of Chinese citizens impoverished. Three articles addressed the topic of development. Harriet Friedmann highlights the myriad shortcomings of the industrial agriculture system and makes a case for indigenous rights and self-determination. Vivek Chibber's history of developmentalism shows how capital used the state to first repress labor and then take control of the state itself, whereupon subsequent development has benefited mostly private interests at the expense of the public. Gerald Greenfield discusses how nationalism has been exploited by leaders in the global South to restructure their states to meet capitalist requirements, suggesting a need to confront both class and capital and not merely U.S. imperial ambitions.

This is arguably the best Socialist Register yet -- the issues covered have never been more pertinent or provocative. The lead article by Varda Burstyn, "The New Imperial Order Foretold", frames the whole volume and is a pleasure to read. It is organized around Orwell and Huxley and their relevance today, and ranges from Orwellian war to Huxleyan "militainment" to nano-technology to mind conditioning to advertising techniques to artificial procreation to criminalizing dissent: a wild, and ultimately chilling ride. The next three articles lay bare the fundamental role of neoliberalism in the shaping of the global order today. Next, Scott Forsyth's "Hollywood Reloaded" is a wonderful discussion of the new order's characteristic film genre: the action blockbuster. Harriet Friedmann's "Feeding the Empire" is a fundamental historical treatment of a critical topic that is simply not talked about enough: food. The regional articles on China, SE Asia, S. Africa, Russia and E. Europe are all good, but the one that boggled my mind was the one on "counterinsurgency" in Columbia -- a mind-bending expose' of the so-called war on drugs, which is in reality a war of terror against popular forces in order to protect forest and oil resources in Venezuela. The book closes with an interview with the "grand old man" of the British left, Tony Benn, focusing on the Bush-Blair relationship: a fitting end to an extremely thought-provoking volume. And all this in just over 300 pages!