Spartacist English edition No. 61

Spring 2009

Corrections

There were several factual errors in “The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism” in Spartacist No. 59 (Spring 2006). The article stated on page 27: “With a labor force of 160 million employed in manufacturing, China’s working class has become a very important component of the industrial proletariat on an international scale.” While there is a wide range of published figures for the number of manufacturing workers in China, the first clause would have been more accurate as follows: “With an estimated workforce of 160 million or more centered in manufacturing and also in construction, energy and extractive industries and transport and telecommunications….” On page 28, we incorrectly cited a passage by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that asserted a “new militancy” that “makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love” as coming from their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. In fact, the passage appeared in their earlier book Empire. On page 29, we spoke of Hardt and Negri “proposing a ‘global parliament’” in Multitude. It would have been more accurate to say that they enthuse over such proposals, as Hardt and Negri qualify their support by asserting that such a scheme “would be unmanageable in practice.”

In “Maintaining a Revolutionary Program in the Post-Soviet Period” in Spartacist No. 60 (Autumn 2007), we observed that “France has also seen combative mobilizations by students and by oppressed minority youth of North African origin” (p. 7). It would have been more accurate to refer to “minority youth of North and West African origin.” On page 15, again referring to France, we should have noted that the “student-centered protests in 2006 against government attempts to further erode the rights of young workers” rapidly expanded to include mass workers demonstrations and strikes. On page 16, we incorrectly referred to an article published in Workers Vanguard No. 891 (27 April 2007) under the headline “Mexico: For Labor Mobilizations Against Starvation Policies, Repression!” as a leaflet issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México. The piece in WV was translated not from a leaflet but from the GEM’s newspaper Espartaco No. 27 (Spring 2007).