Editorial Notes

Abstract

11 September 2001. For journals of the Left, moreover, it is imperative to provide space for and encourage critical reflection on their roots and their aftermaths. In this issue, we publish the initial reflections of six scholars: Neil Smith; Sandra Whitworth; Ellen Wood; Leo Panitch; Christopher Powell, and Aijaz Ahmad. The themes they develop—capitalist globalization, the place of the national state in the emergent global (dis)order, resistance and prospects for renewal of a democratic Left—run through this issue. Living within walking distance of “ground zero,” Neil Smith directly confronted not only the enormity of the destruction, but also the inability to comprehend on the part of many for whom the violence of the 20th century had remained distant, even when the American state was directly implicated. Answers to the question “why us” require a “multi-scalar” perspective—one capable of recognizing the multiple and complex connections traversing local, national and global spaces. That the 11th of September made it more difficult, and yet imperative, to raise critical questions about that order was readily apparent to Sandra Whitworth as she faces her introductory international relations class. For Whitworth, the questions that need to be asked include who has power and how are (particular) gendered identities appealed to by the US Establishment and its “Other.” Few on the Left will have missed the symbolic dimension of those terrible events: the perpetrators chose to attack key symbols of American capitalism’s economic dominion and military might. This is not accidental, as both Leo Panitch and Ellen Wood stress. Islamic and other fundamentalisms have stepped into the vacuum created by the defeat of the old Left and the US-backed crushing of secular nationalist opponents of corrupt regimes. And the very fact that the Left and the attackers appear to have common enemies is helping to justify the imposition of stringent “anti-terrorist” legislation