When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.

We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it

The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment

But even in the absence of direct interference by those who had the power to interfere, the process was usually aborted by the non-availability of one of more elements of the process - the accumulated stock in a money form, the labor-power to be utilized by the producer, the network of distributors, the consumers who were purchasers. One or more elements were missing because, in previous historical social systems, one or more of these elements was not commodified or was insufficiently commodified.

This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.

As a matter of law the states recognized no constraints on their legislative scope other than those that were self-imposed. Even where particular state constitutions paid ideological lip service to constraints deriving from religious or natural law doctrines, they reserved to some constitutionally-defined body or person the right to interpret these doctrines.