Abundance, yes, and while Capital has not merely pointed to it but released it like a sorcerer’s apprentice, it now appears that it has lost its “magic touch” and may not be able to keep the act going on for much longer. Anyway, in the midst of plenty, it cannot even assure sufficiency within its own metropolises, while the food waste it engages in underlines this fact. In America, the Second Harvest Network claims to have fed 25 million Americans in 2006. The Society of St. Andrew quotes a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate that 96 billion pounds of food are wasted each year, while 35 million Americans (out of a total of some 302 million) are living in poverty.

We speculated about what one of President Bush’s background advisers would tell us if abducted from a hotel for a day or two and subjected to questioning by an Underground Revolutionary Court, having taking a truth drug. Lies, of course, will continue to be told if they are contained in the questions, so a truth drug would probably only help to smooth the process a little. As a result, we feel that in what follows, although the truth surely makes an appearance, lies (and secrets) still skulk around in many places, as well as omissions, denials and all the other tracks that lead back to the obscure, hidden from us because of our own involuntary dependence on lies. But although Power knows itself very well and conceals a myriad of secrets, there is always far more it can never comprehend.

There is no question that a concerted effort exists in Britain to mold the population’s minds, hearts and souls.

“On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometers away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away.” (Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, 2003

The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact –or rather a territorial compromise –held. The Revolution held the grounds, the auditorium and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened. (Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”,1989)

We want to look at the way things have moved on this page since it was started. Our records show that people are visiting it. At the time of writing (June 22, 2006 ), we have had 3,242 hits and 1615 visits since March 13, 2006. The most popular articles have been, “The Profits of Abundance and War” (Part 1) and Abundance, Poverty and Power (Part 1).

Prosperity is not a moral question and the justification of San Domingo was its prosperity.

The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth.

By John Pilger

The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a “civil war” and “sectarian violence” were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

A review of Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx by Tom Rockmore

By David North
WSWS

Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, by Tom Rockmore. 224 pages, Blackwell Publishers, 2002. US$29.95

Tom Rockmore, who teaches Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, begins his book Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, with the following statement:

A review of Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx by Tom Rockmore

By David North
WSWS

Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, by Tom Rockmore. 224 pages, Blackwell Publishers, 2002. US$29.95

The purpose of Rockmore’s assault on Engels becomes transparent as soon as he turns his attention to Marx. By claiming that it was the philosophically-ignorant Engels who created what is known as “Marxism” by falsifying and distorting the conceptions of his lifelong comrade and friend, Rockmore feels free to unveil a “new” Marx—that is, one without the materialistic narrative that supposedly was composed by Engels after the former’s death. And so, contrary to the claims of Engels and several generations of “Marxists,” the real Marx had no substantial differences with the philosophical outlook of Hegel. Rockmore claims that “it is crucial to go beyond politically motivated claims for distinctions in kind between Marx and Hegel, or again between Marx and philosophy, or even between philosophy and science; for it is only in this way that one can see that in the final analysis Marx is not only a philosopher, or a German philosopher, but a German Hegelian, hence a German idealist philosopher” (161).