As the global financial and credit crisis evolves, the famine will take further millions of lives and aid programs designed to counter famine will fall more to political manipulations. Only few know, that rocketing food prices pushed additional 75 million persons under the famine level, thus the estimated total number of underfed people in the globe reached 923 million in 2007. It is important but different problem how the weak resistance against the abuses of the capitalist system expresses itself in Hungary in the behaviour of the youth. An interesting sociological study addresses this question analysing the political attitudes of the left and extreme right. A further and comprehensive article examines the class determination of voters in the free elections in Hungary. This issue of Eszmélet also publishes articles on the theory and movement of socialism by internationally respected Marxist thinkers: Samir Amin and István Mészáros.

Cover image:1980 Wold Press Photo of the Year: Mike Wells, UK: Starving boy and a missionary, Uganda, Karamoja district, April 1980.

Table of contents

1. Tütő László : Even the only one party was too many – The Left Wing Alternative turns 20
2. Wiener György : Class situation and electoral behaviour after the system change (1989-2006)
3. Szalai Erzsébet : Flash-back of the past and dividing future – Young left, green and extreme right activists in present day Hungary
4. Mészáros István : The communal system and the principle of self-critique
5. Immanuel Wallerstein : Where is the world headed?
6. Benyik Mátyás : Dollarization, euroization and financial instability?
7. Tütő László : How not to protect our state?
8. Walden Bello : Manufacturing a food crisis
9. Alexander King, Anette Groth : Whoever controls food …
10. Marcello Musto : The dissemination and the reception of the Grundrisse in the world. A contribution to the history of Marxism
11. Marcello Musto : The current importance of Marx, 150 years after the Grundrisse – interview with Eric Hobsbawm

This issue of Eszmélet addresses the consequences of the global power of the capital, the crisis in the operation and control of the world system, the special features of regional developments, the causes of hierarchy and how to change it. China and Africa gained a new position in the world system but this shift has not reduced inequalities, on the contrary, it expanded them both at regional and national levels. Contradictions created by neoliberal "technologies" to govern the global order are also shown in the tension between developments into an empire and the "death" of national states. Articles dealing with this issue also show possible resistance, and self-defence against it. The existence of the national state on the (semi)-periphery becomes more and more "virtual" that invoked the forms of resistance resembling to ones in the middle age: the religious and national "renaissance" fits into this trend. The neoliberal economic project, as a historically determined form of class power, is organised on a global level. Our articles also examine the historic, economic and market relations of this organised power and compare the development of the East with the West. Further studies deal with the traditions in the labour movement like the reception of the now 160 year old Communist Manifesto in Italy and unknown aspects of the history of the Ukrainian revolutionary tradition.

Table of contents

1. Don Kalb : From flows to violence: Politics and knowledge in the debates on globalisation and empire
2. Giovanni Arrighi : Historical Perspectives on States, Markets and Capitalism, East and West
3. Giovanni Arrighi : The African crisis – World Systemic and Regional Aspects
4. Samir Amin : Fall of the Europe Project?
5. Rémy Herrera, Luciano Vasapollo : Mass movement and class organisation in present Latin America
6. Andor László : Bright-side economics
7. ATTAC Európa : ATTAC’s statement on the financial crisis and democratic alternatives
8. Vincze Ibolya : East Europe, Russia, China – Experience of transition countries from a comparative view
9. Tütő László : Unpopular “popular history” – or how to protect our state
10. Rob Lyon : China, Tibet and the world economy
11. Marcello Musto : Dissemination and Reception of the Manifesto in Italy – From the origins to 1945
12. Christopher Ford : Clash of social emancipation and national liberation – on the views of Mikola Pors

According to the author, the spread of the neoliberal agenda was the product of the now broken alliance between political and free-market liberals. The power of the emerging transnational class changes its form – proletarianization of the world population, de-legitimation of the state and parochialization of post-citizens – our pasts, ethnic or religious, are becoming our future now because categorical values, beliefs and loyalties are taking the place of the universalist modernisms gone awry.

The article originally was published in Anthropological Theory, Vol.5, No. 2. 176-204. (2005)

The capitalist character of market-based development is not determined by the presence of capitalist institutions and dispositions but by the relation of state power to capital. In the Ming and early Qing eras market-based development in China and throughout East Asia remained non-capitalist. The synergy typical of the European developmental path between militarism, industrialism and capitalism was absent in East Asia.

The original article was published in Japan Focus on 10 January, 2008.