Charles Derber

Naming the Enemy : Anti-corporate movements confront globalization

* Introduction * 1. Structure and Anti-Structure in the Face of Globalization * 2. Contestation and Reform * 3. Globalization from Below * 4. Delinking, Relocalization and Sovereignty * 5. PopCulture versus AgriCulture & Other Reflections on the Anti-Corporate Movement * A Partial List of Organizations * Sources * Index

Sponsorship and the control of physicians

The dramatic shift from solo to organizationally-based practice of physicians has been widely noted.2 Physicians now work in a remarkable array of different organizational contexts, with a significant percentage fullor parttime salaried, or in other contractual relations with hospitals, health maintenance organizations or other provider institutions.3 The question to be addressed here is whether the new arrangements reflect the proletarianization of physicians, as has been suggested recently by a number of social theorists, or, more conservatively, a process leading in that direction. The proletarianization thesis is that physicians have been drawn into new dependent relations of production with providers of capital militating toward forms of wage-employment. It suggests this entails loss of control over the process of work, much like the loss of autonomy experienced by the crafts in the nineteenth century, as they become absorbed within the factory system of capitalist production.

What's Left? Radical Politics in the Postcommunist Era.

The collapse of Soviet-style communism has provoked an identity crisis among socialists and leftists giving rise to separate identity politics among feminists, gays and other social movements. This study explores this crisis and offers suggestions for a new vision and direction for the left.

Arms control: misplaced focus

The authors believe that paying attention to weapons—whether advocating increases or reductions— detracts from the basic task of dealing with the sources of conflict and militarism.

Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry

H ope is crucial to most political activism, but when the situation is dire, watch out for the “hope industry.” It’s made up of institutions and people who send out messages of false hope, stoking collective ignorance, soothing consumers’ consciences, and revving up the climate change engine. In the age of climate change, false hope is everywhere. It takes two main forms: denial and necessary illusions. The denial message is spouted and funded by the core of the U.S. hope industry: the big energy companies and the Republican Party. Some peddlers of denial say climate change is not happening. Others acknowledge its existence but say humans did not cause it. And yet others within the corporate hope industry say climate change is real but deny its gravity, telling us that smart companies can solve the problem. Hey, no worries. Because the problem doesn’t exist or will resolve itself. According to polls, about 40 percent of Americans buy into this corporate false hope. The mass denial is devastating to real hope. Some liberals tend to believe that the problem can be solved within the existing economic and political system. The liberal false hope is that conventional politics can deal with the problem — or that personal changes in lifestyle (recycling, driving hybrids, going to farmer markets) will do the trick. Along with liberal citizens, selfproclaimed “environmentally friendly” companies — whether Exxon and Chevron or Bank of America and McDonalds — promote this denial. Hopepeddling corporations make money off their “greenwashing,” a word invented to describe the acts of companies that lie to persuade consumers that their products are environmentally safe. This goes beyond “clean coal” companies and oil corporations fracking for natural gas. A 2010 report called “The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition” conducted by the environmental marketing agency TerraChoice showed that 95 percent of consumer products claiming to be green were lying or obfuscating in some way, and the annual Greenwash Academy Awards have exposed some of the worst offenders. Whole industries profit deceitfully on individuals’ efforts to live green. False hope also takes the form of “necessary illusions” — corporatemanufactured messages that justify corporate rule. Noam Chomsky has identified several of the necessary illusions in circulation within our society: the virtues of the market, the benign invisible hand of capitalism, the morality of American militarism, and American exceptionalism. In the context of climate change, these translate into the following false hopes:

The Second American Revolution

R alph Nader has written an entirely unexpected story of a secondAmericanRevolution orchestrated and financed by aging billionaires such asWarren Buffett, Ted Turner, and Yoko Ono and carried out bymillions ofmobilizedmainstreamAmericans and a patriotic parrot named Polly. The Second Revolution is against the King Georges of corporate America who rule the country with their lobbyists onKStreet and handmaidens in Congress. Themasses triumph, take back the country, rein in the corporations, and begin a more authentic democratic American experiment. But such a triumphof a people’smovement isutterly impossible, right? For most Americans, including most on the Left, system change has become a pipe dream. The truth is that we have become cynical and no longer believe we cantransformthecapitalistU.S.hegemon. Systemchangeisnowconsideredautopian conceit. Leftist intellectuals have become complicit inthisnewfatalism,writingendless books and articles critiquing current policiesbutoffering(withsomeexceptions, as in thismagazine) almost nothing about how to imagine and create a revolutionary transformation. Ironically, it’s primarily the far Right that has perseveredwith a utopian politics and a celebration of intellectuals who unabashedly offer a revolutionary system change. Think only of Ayn Rand, whose utopias, such as the Fountainhead andAtlas Shrugged, continuetobe read by millions on the Right. Right-wing populist movements, such as the Tea Party, thriveonsuchunreasonable flights of utopian imagination, rejecting pragmatism for hyperconservative and antisystemic idealism, even where it appears to violate their own interests. They may not get all they want, but by demanding the impossible, they can plausibly get more of what ispossible. The U.S. Left used to have its own utopian sensibility, and Nader has now resurrected it. In 1888, at the peak of the GildedAge,Massachusetts lawyerEdward Bellamy published Looking Backwards, a visionary socialist novel that sold onemillionhardcover books to themass public. It had authoritarian elements that—as with many utopian visions—could conceivably createdystopiaratherthanutopia.ButBellamy’s utopian best seller spawned a new breed of leftist intellectuals who did not find it silly to paint pictures of a world beyondgreed,predatoryfinance,androbberbaron capitalism. And Bellamy spurred cooperativist, socialist, and radical labor movements that promoted previously unimaginable progressive reform. The fading of the radical,utopianU.S.Left in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has gone largely without notice. Established intellectuals in the Beltway and New York highbrow literary circles live happily in this new world of hegemonic pragmatism, and leftist intellectuals, mainly ensconced in comfortable academic positions, have, for the most part, reconciled themselves to it. In his blistering 1960s critique—titled American Power and the New Mandarins— Noam Chomsky was one of the first to headline the extreme seriousness of this collapseof intellectual visionandcourage. HistorianRussellJacobyhasdescribed theintelligentsia’scapitulationasoneofthe great tragic chapters in intellectualhistory. Inbooks suchasTheLast Intellectualsand The End of Utopia, Jacoby ferociously attacks leftist intelligentsia forabandoning the radical imagination. Radical imagination, after all, is not a path toward tenure. Theprofessionalizationofthe leftist intelligentsia in the university has undercut the temperament and intellectual capacity to evenconceiveadifferentworld.

If not socialism, what?*

The sun has set on the prospects for socialism after the Cold War. As Paul Starr proclaimed in a funeral oratory, “it is evidently harder to enter the kingdom of socialism than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” But the “death of socialism,” a tragedy for many on the left, may be a blessing in disguise, opening the door to more promising economic alternatives. The most important of these, which has been emerging quietly in the shadow of the socialism‐vs.‐cap‐italism debate is the “social market.”

U.S. Unilateral Arms Control Initiatives: When Do They Work?@@@American Interests, American Purpose: Moral Reasoning and U.S. Foreign Policy@@@The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter--and What Does@@@Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint

The Controversy Theory and Method Soviet Foreign Policy Case Study: Orbiting Nuclear Weapons (1962-63) Case Study: Nuclear Testing (1963) Case Study: Medium-Range Bombers (1964-65) Case Study: Antiballistic Missiles (1967-68) Case Study: Neutron Bombs (1978) Principal Findings Applications of Knowledge