Re: Shiller on housing bubble

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sam Gindin:
> As for the Socialist Register, your point about paying more attention to
> struggles elsewhere,(a point you raised in your generally sympathetic
> review of SR earlier) is fair enough. You are certainly right to raise the
> importance of something specifically on Venezuela and Bolivia.  What is
> unfair, however, is to imply that SR is  completely ignoring this.  Aside
> from the fact that the issues on imperialism are clearly meant to be of
> relevance to those struggles (and, in fact , the last issue of SR was
> translated into Spanish with the first run selling out surprisingly fast)
> note that over the past five years, SR has also included: 4 articles on
> the struggles going on in Latin America; 3 each on struggles within India,
> Africa, and the Mid-East   (including in both the formal anf informal
> sectors);  4 articles addressing forced migration and the impact of
> immigration; and articles on the struggles in Chiapas, the working class
> in Russia, the general relationship between workers in the north and
> south, the tenuous borders  between 'peasants' and the working class.

I suppose I am expecting too much from SR, which does provide first-rate
analysis about various aspects of the global economy. But if I were editor
of such a journal, I'd have a different emphasis--one that engaged the
South as a subject rather than an object. For example, I am very familiar
with the work of Vivek Chibber but I am far more receptive to the writings
of somebody like Hamza Alavi or even M. Shahid Alam who is not a Marxist.
As Yaffee pointed out, even if hyperbolically so, Chibber and Greenfield
find little value in national struggles. If you can't see the value in such
struggles, then much of what's going on the South will seem unimportant. I
think that's one thing you folks share with Michael Hardt, despite
appearing as his adversary on debates--a belief that national liberation
struggles are some kind of exercise in futility or worse.

My strong suggestion is to include something on Venezuela in 2006 by
Lebowitz or Harnecker. I also would approach Tom Kruse about writing
something on Bolivia. Kruse, who used to post to pen-l, is a brilliant
writer and scholar.