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When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them.&hellip; Before I could read, my grandfather read to me from Bad Bishop Brown's <em>Science and History for Girls and Boys</em>. My grandfather believed that at a minimum every socialist worker should be familiar with cosmology, evolution, and history. I never separated history, in which we are active participants, from science, the finding out how things are. My family had broken with organized religion five generations back, but my father sat me down for Bible study every Friday evening because it was an important part of the surrounding culture and important to many people, a fascinating account of how ideas develop in changing conditions, and because every atheist should know it as well as believers do.&hellip; On my first day of primary school, my grandmother urged me to learn everything they could teach me&mdash;but not to believe it all. She was all too aware of the "racial science" of 1930s Germany and the justifications for eugenics and male supremacy that were popular in our own country. Her attitude came from her knowledge of the uses of science for power and profit and from a worker's generic distrust of the rulers. Her advice formed my stance in academic life: consciously in, but not of, the university.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-11" title="Vol. 67, No. 11: April 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, April 2016 (Volume 67, Number 11)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-11-2016-04/">buy this issue</a></div>The March/April 2016 issue of <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is devoted in large part to the topic of economic stagnation. The editorial by Jonathan Tepperman, the journal's managing editor, declares: "Today, with China slumping, energy prices collapsing, and nervous consumers sitting on their hands, growth has ground to a halt almost everywhere, and economists, investors, and ordinary citizens are starting to confront a grim new reality: the world is stuck in the slow lane and nobody seems to know what to do about it." This is followed by eight articles on stagnation, only one of which, however&mdash;"The Age of Secular Stagnation" by Lawrence H. Summers&mdash;is, in our opinion, of any real importance.&hellip; Summers heavily criticizes those like Robert J. Gordon, in <em>The Rise and Fall of American Growth</em> (2016), who attribute stagnation to supply-side "headwinds"&hellip;blocking productivity growth.&hellip; Likewise Summers dispatches those like Kenneth Rogoff who see stagnation as merely the product of a debt supercycle associated with periodic financial crises.&hellip; Despite such sharp criticisms of other mainstream interpretations of stagnation, Summers's own analysis can be faulted for being superficial and vague, lacking historical concreteness.&hellip; In fact, the current mainstream debate on secular stagnation is so superficial and circumspect that one cannot help but wonder whether the main protagonists&mdash;figures like Summers, Gordon, Paul Krugman, and Tyler Cowen&mdash;are not deliberately tiptoeing around the matter, worried that if they get too close or make too much noise they might awaken some sleeping giant (the working class?) as in the days of the Great Depression and the New Deal.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-11" title="Vol. 67, No. 11: April 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Personal experience informs a discussion of the state of Cuban socialism, drawing also on other revolutionary movements & focusing heavily on issues of democracy. Discussion opens with a look at the logic of socialism, which is addressed in terms of the kind of decisions required to fulfill the socialist project. The kind of consumption required to meet the socialist goal of raising the living standard without descending into "consumerism" is examined. The ideal-practice gap is considered as a necessary phenomenon, asserting the need to recognizing socialism's defects as part of the revolutionary process. Democracy in the emerging socialisms is next explored, highlighting unresolved problems related to political leadership & associated producers, identity & difference, bureaucracy & innovation, socialism & the media, & the form & substance of democracy. Three key requisites for revolutionary criticism are identified in closing. Adapted from the source document.

Outlines three types of explanations for the persistent lack of success of development programs. Attention is given to a systemic explanation operating on the levels of political economy, the institutional organization of the knowledge industry, & the reductionist intellectual structure of programs. Considered in particular, is the notion of a "generic conflict of interest" that impairs knowledge development. A series of dialectical clues is offered as a way to devise a more "holistic, complex, integral approach to scientific problems.". Adapted from the source document.