The Dystopia of our Times: Genetic Technology and Other Afflictions

This essay will concentrate on discussing, in turn, three areas of health - the emergence of new diseases, the harms of persistent organic pollutants, and the threats of biotechnology and genetic engineering - that are linked to ecology and technology. The health crises that will be entailed by the developments I trace in these areas will indelibly mark the first decades of the next century, and are already sounding harsh dystopic warnings around the world. I shall go on to argue that these developments must challenge socialists to find the political means of effecting new forms for international co-ordination and co-operation to recover control over the mobility and concentration of capital and the production technologies it employs; and of directing economic development according to the health criteria of human and environmental well-being at the community and sectoral levels where industrial production takes place

The New Imperial Order Foretold

Are the futures depicted in science fiction films like Blade Runner and The Matrix really possible ones--projections of things that already exist? Or are they meant to be symbolic or metaphorical? In these early years of the twenty-first century--the 'New American Century', if the imperialists have their way--it is sobering and enlightening to re-read, with these questions in mind, two earlier futurist visions that have deeply influenced the makers of these and other modern dystopias--Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. These books have been extraordinarily influential, both on generations of readers whose political consciousness has been affected by them, and on generations of writers, in non-fiction as well as fiction. A re-reading today yields some very striking lessons in assessing our present, and in thinking about our future

Anticipaciones sobre el Nuevo Orden Imperial

En el mundo de The Matrix y sus secuelas, las máquinas inteligentes han tomado el poder en un planeta devastado y cultivan seres humanos para usarlos como su fuente de energía primaria. Encerrados cual larvas en sombríos y pegajosos compartimentos de gestación, vigilados y oprimidos por los avatares** de las máquinas, los humanos son inducidos, de por vida, a experimentar alucinaciones de una existencia común y corriente, alucinaciones destinadas a asegurar que permanecerán como pasivos y sumisos combustibles para las grandes y omnipotentes computadoras. Al final de la saga de tres películas, los pocos miembros de la resistencia han ganado un transitorio y –a la luz de lo que ha venido ocurriendo– completamente ilusorio respiro, con un futuro incierto

Masculine Dominance and the State

The speech from which this article has been developed was given at a session of the Winnipeg Marx Centenary conference1 entitled 'Women and the Economic and Political Crisis'. That a crisis exists in the world economic and political order there can be no doubt. There can also be little doubt that there is a crisis in the organised Marxist movement defined in general terms as composed of the far Left groups, the Communist and parts of the Social Democratic Parties, and important parts of the socialist networks which exist in mass movements and institutions. The causes of Marxism's crisis are both historical and contemporary. Historically speaking, Marxism is only now beginning any large-scale recovery from its Stalinist deep-freeze as far as its own capacity to generate the kinds of answers demanded by the questions posed by the class struggle today is concerned. In the meantime, its liberatory potential has been tarnished in the eyes of millions of people, and insofar as it continues its association with the bureaucratic regimes of the transitional societies, that potential will continue to be dulled. There are a number of contemporary problems which also present major obstacles to Marxism's overall capacity to provide revolutionary solutions. The one I want to single out in this discussion is the crisis between the genders that has hit and rocked the Marxist movement, from the smallest local study group to the largest workers' party, during the preceding decade and continuing into the eighties. These two crises are distinct problems, but they overlap in important ways historically, and need to be addressed together in the period to come. One of the most crucial areas of both anti- Stalinist and feminist concerns is the enormous set of issues regarding the nature and role of the state. In this article I want to tackle the general problem feminists have described when they talk about Marxist categories obscuring relations of masculine dominance by a specific discussion of the state, and the ways in which it acts as an organiser and enforcer of male supremacy. Socialist feminists have been developing a body of scholarship and theory over the last ten to fifteen years that has until now barely been engaged by most Marxist men. It is in the spirit of the positive gains that can flow from such an engagement that this article is offered