G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton University Press, 1978). back

Kai Nielsen, "On Taking Historical Materialism Seriously" Dialogue XXII (1983): 319-338. back

Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, p. 203. (Emphasis Cohen's.) back

Nielsen, "Historical Materialism," p. 338. back

One small piece of supporting evidence: During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government celebrated the number of "enemy combatants" killed. The now-notorious "body counts" were a regular feature of the nightly news. By contrast, the U.S. government today has refused to release even an estimate as to how many Iraqi soldiers were killed in our latest war. Why? Because those officials controlling the news flow know that Americans are not going to be thrilled by high numbers. Those much-maligned American TV viewers, for whom the presentation of the war was so carefully scripted, are far more likely to feel a pang of empathy for those young dead Iraqi soldiers than would ever have been the case thirty years ago for the dead Viet Cong. back

I am not claiming that economic relations approximating slavery or serfdom have disappeared completely, for they have not. But these forms tend to exist in the interstices of contemporary economies. Nowhere are they economically dominant. back

All of these antedate capitalism, but all underwent significant modification so as to serve as legitimating factors of the new system. back

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979). back

The seminal text is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1988). Published in German in 1944. back

Overcapacity relative to effective demand--not, of course, relative to the needs and wants of existing human beings. "Overproduction" does not stand in contradiction of Marxian "fettering," but is an exemplification. back

See After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); see also, Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993). The former is a less technical version of the former, updated and with greater concern for historical materialism and the transition question. back

Slavoj Zizek, "How Much Democracy is Too Much?" In These Times, June 9, 2003, p. 25. back

Alasdair MacIntryre, After Virtue (Notre Dame University Press, 1981), p. 245. back

Arundhati Roy, War Talk, (South End Press, 2003), p. 75. back