:: Analysis

The corruption scandal of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was an event waiting to happen.

Globalization at a minimum involves the creation of a world economy that is not merely the sum of its national economies, but rather a powerful independent reality, created by the international division of labor and the world market which, in the present epoch, predominates over national markets.

The Soviet Union has transited from a repressive and authoritarian communist regime in which social welfare, full employment, and a secure old age predominated to a savage capitalism in which a small minority of Mafia business thugs, ex-communist bureaucrats, and new rich speculators have pillaged the economy leaving 60 percent of the population in poverty and the vast majority of pensioners penniless.

The sequence of capitalist expansion, destruction of traditional bonds andglobal integration was, according to Marx, the process of creating a unified working class, conscious of its class interests and linked across national boundaries.

By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectorsof the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizingthe society and provoking large-scale social discontent.

Introduction: “Post-Marxism” has become a fashionable intellectual posture, with the triumph of neo-liberalism and the retreat of the working class.

The admission of three former members of the Eastern bloc into NATO was described by President Clinton as \”a very great day not only for Europe and the United States, not simply for NATO but indeed for the cause of freedom in the aftermath of the Cold War.\”

On January 15 President Clinton announced that Mexico had repaid all of the $12.5 billion it borrowed from Washington to stave off financial collapse and bail out Wall Street speculators.