Publications
Through the years, the IIRE has used different venues to develop and diffuse left-wing ideas. Aside from our courses, an important pillar of our work is our publication program. We have published over 50 issues of our Notebooks for Study and Research, currently in cooperation with left-wing publisher Merlin Press. We have also produced Working Papers: working documents that often form the basis of future publications and serve to stimulate discussion for newer drafts. A third outlet is our website on which we publish audio- and video-recordings of our courses.
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Notebooks for Study and Research
The results of the IIRE's work are made available to a larger public in large part through our publication series, the Notebooks for Study and Research. Since 1986 we have published dozens of issues of the Notebooks. The Notebooks focus on themes of contemporary debate or historical or theoretical importance, sometimes based on lectures given in sessions in our Institute. Since 1998 they were published as a book series in collaboration with Pluto Press in London and since 2010 in cooperation with Merlin Press. Different issues of the Notebooks have also appeared in languages besides English, including French, German, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish, Swedish, Danish and Russian.
View items...Working papers
The Working Papers of the IIRE are designed to announce works in progress and circulate early drafts and materials, an important stage in preparing them for possible later publication – whether as a Notebook for Study and Research, one or several articles in a magazine, a book, etc. They represent in particular reworked transcripts of oral educational reports.
The circulation of the WPIIRE is deliberately limited and may vary depending on the topic at hand. Their main purpose is to help the author by stimulating comments, suggestions and criticisms. These may concern the content as well as the form, the sources as well as the analysis. We hope the WPIIRE will enhance international exchanges and contribute to a better collectivization of current theoretical, historical and political thinking.
The studies presented in this format generally retain an unfinished character. They are circulated to insure some exchange prior to completion and possible publication. It is therefore requested that they not be quoted or referred to in public without the formal authorization of the author.
All Working Papers are available in PDF.
View items...Fatherland or Mother Earth?
Essays on the National Question
Michael LöwyIIRE/Pluto Press, Notebook for Study and Research no. 27/28 (108 pp., € 16, £10.99, $16)
In Fatherland or Mother Earth? leading French Marxist Michael Löwy argues that the fragmentary writings on national issues by Marx and Engels have the potential to form the basis of a coherent theory, a truly international dialectic which yet remains to be developed. This theory draws on contributions from key thinkers such as Lenin and Otto Bauer. Löwy argues that the explosion of nationalist movements around the world today cannot be wholly understood without acknowledging Lenin's notion of 'oppressed nations' nor be adequately addressed without Bauer's toolbox of 'national/cultural autonomy'. Löwy demonstrates that by doing justice to national realities and identities, and simultaneously linking together new forms of social-movement internationalism - anti-IMF, ecological, feminist - a new internationalism can be created for the twenty-first century.
Born in 1938 in São Paulo, Brazil, Michael Löwy has lived in Paris since 1969, where he is now director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research. One of the most versatile Marxist intellectuals of our time, he has been widely published in English and French (as well as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, etc.). His books in English include: The Marxism of Che Guevara (1971), Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1978), The Politics of Uneven and Combined Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (1981), the IIRE Notebook Marxism and Liberation Theology (1988), On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993) and The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996).
The Trade-Union Left and the Birth of a New South Africa
Claude JacquinIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 26 (92 pp., €2.75, £2, $3.25)
In the 1970s and '80s a wave of industrialization contributed to the greatest political and social mobilization in South African history, of which the trade-union movement was one of the central driving forces. One particularly interesting current that emerged was the 'independent trade-union left' that played a key role in the birth of the union federation COSATU. In The Trade-Union Left and the Birth of a New South Africa, Claude Jacquin follows the political, social and economic changes that ultimately brought an end to apartheid. All the forces that tried to combine 'democratic' emancipation with social liberation ultimately failed, he says. The current ANC government's choice for neo-liberal management of South African society is very remote from the options defended in the debates of the 1980s: not only from the socialism once advocated by the trade-union left, but also from the 'national democratic revolution' advocated by its adversaries in the South African Communist Party. Jacquin's account of how these two currents converged as they abandoned their original perspectives should contribute to lively debates.
Claude Jacquin covered South African events for the fortnighly International Viewpoint and carried out research during ten visits to South Africa between 1982 and 1992. His other works include studies of the Angolan revolution and the independence movement in New Caledonia.
World Bank/IMF/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco
Susan George, Michel Chossudovsky et al.IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 24/25 (116 pp.) [OUT OF PRINT]
The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization have managed to impose neo-liberal policies on virtually the entire world. The 16 authors of the anthology IMF/World Bank/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco explain how the IMF and World Bank prevail on governments to sacrifice their inhabitants' health, education and nutrition in order to funnel money to Western banks. Despite rhetoric about 'ecologically sustainable development' and 'social safety nets', pressure to respect 'intellectual property rights' and devote 'everything to export' is pushing the Third World deeper into dependency. Nowhere have these policies slowed global impoverishment: neither in the disaster area that is Africa; nor in Latin America, where the 'lost decade' of the 1980s still drags on; nor in the ruins of Russia's half-dismantled economy.
IMF/World Bank/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco raises disturbing questions about how unelected institutions are pre-empting democratic decision-making. Its aims are to inform, analyze, provoke thought and discussion, and increase awareness of international initiatives that advance democratic alternatives.
Lean Production - A Capitalist Utopia?
Tony SmithIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 23 (68 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
Are innovative ways of organizing production and marketing eliminating antagonisms between capital and labour, between producers and consumers, and between different companies? Does 'lean production' unite companies, workers and consumers in the harmonious pursuit of common interests? In Lean Production: A Capitalist Utopia?, Tony Smith explains how lean production is transforming many of the earlier, 'Fordist' ways of organizing the economy. He examines changing relationships between employers and employees, between producers and consumers, and between different firms. In the end he concludes that the real changes brought about by lean production do not alter the exploitative, alienating and anarchic character of capitalism. A socialist economy based on grassroots participation and democratic coordination, he suggests, could match the dynamism of lean production while keeping lean production's broken promises of cooperation and harmony.
Tony Smith is professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and advisory editor of the magazine Against the Current. His books include The Logic of Marx's 'Capital'.
Women's Lives in the New Global Economy
Penny Duggan & Heather Dashner (editors)IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 22 (68 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
Women's Lives in the New Global Economy links together transformations that are affecting women in factories and farms, as peddlers and professionals, as neighbours, mothers and wives, in old age and even in the womb. Twelve feminist activists and scholars on five continents describe sweeping changes that are being brought about by the growth of world trade, regional economic integration (EU/NAFTA/ MERCOSUR) and austerity policies that respond to pressures for 'competitiveness'. Focusing sometimes on working conditions, sometimes on family life, sometimes on the interaction of gender, class, race and caste, they show how much capital's projects for economic reorganization depend on women's cheap labour in the Third World, 'flexible' labour in advanced capitalist countries and unpaid labour in homes everywhere. And they show how from Sweden to Malaysia new forms of women's oppression are stimulating new forms of women's resistance.
These contributions are the product of several years of sessions at the IIRE devoted to examining women's place in society. In all their diversity, they illustrate how activists collaborating within a shared frame of reference can use their different experiences to develop a truly international analysis of the processes at work today.
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Factory Committees and Workers' Control in Petrograd in 1917
David MandelIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 21 (48pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
Factory Committees and Workers' Control in Petrograd in 1917 tells the story of 1917 'from below', delving into Russian-language archives to uncover worker-activists' own words. Petrograd workers did not dream at first of 'socialist experiments' in backward Russia. But factory owners put up a fierce resistance to demands for an eight-hour day and a 'constitutional regime' in the workplaces, and decided to shut down their plants rather than yield their prerogatives. Factory committees were ultimately driven, in a desperate effort to save workers' jobs, to take management into their own hands and appeal to the Bolshevik government to nationalize the factories. Mandel assesses and refutes common conceptions about 'utopian' and 'anarchistic' impulses supposedly behind the October Revolution.
David Mandel teaches political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is active in solidarity with the Russian labour movement, and writes frequently on Russia for Alternatives, International Viewpoint and other publications. Among his previous works are The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime and Perestroika and the Soviet People.
To download this book in PDF-format, click the following links:
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The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia - An Overview
Catherine SamaryIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 19/20 (60pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia is a comprehensive report on the Yugoslav tragedy: a historical overview; a multi-disciplinary social study; an invitation to collective reflection; and a call for solidarity with those working for peace with justice for all the ex-Yugoslav communities. Author Catherine Samary shows the interaction of national and international, socio-economic and political, past and present factors at work. She concludes that the war could have been avoided. She gives a multi-causal explanation, dissecting the various one-sided accounts being put forward and assigning responsibility to several actors. Going back in time, she looks at the history of the Yugoslav revolution and the Yugoslav Communists' conflict with Stalin. She draws a balance sheet of the Titoist regime, the experience of self-management, and the sharp turn toward the market that took place in the 1980s. Finally, she considers what national self-determination means today. Including Bosnian documents, a glossary, a bibliography, peace groups' addresses in ex-Yugoslavia and a list of helpful journals, this Notebook is an indispensable tool both for scholars seeking to draw the lessons of a half-century of Yugoslav history and for people working for lasting peace in the region.
Catherine Samary is an economist, specialist on Balkans and Eastern Europe. She has been active in several internationalist associations since the sixties. Founding member of Espaces Marx and member of the scientific council of the French association ATTAC. She teaches at the Université Paris-Dauphine, where she is also involved as researcher in the IRISSO (Inter-disciplinary Institute of Research in Social Sciences) ; she is also associated to the Institut d'Etudes Européennes at Université Paris 8 where she makes lectures on Eastward enlargement of the European Union. An IIRE Fellow, Samary is also the author of No.7/8 Market, Plan and Democracy: The Experience of the So-Called Socialist Countries. Besides her studies on Yugoslavia, she does ongoing research on the (ex-) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and theoretical and historical questions concerning transitional economies and societies.
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October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social Revolution?
Ernest MandelIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 17/18 (64pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
Although it is no longer 'fashionable' to refer to it, the Russian Revolution remains a major experience of the twentieth century. Knowledge of it is indispensable to those who wish to understand the contemporary world, or to see clearly how to proceed in the fight for socialism. In October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social Revolution? Ernest Mandel sets out to analyze it in a polemical and critical essay. Polemical, because today this revolution is the target of such a strong campaign of ideological denigration that one of the formative experiences of the past century has become incomprehensible. Mandel, writing as both a historian and an activist, comes back to the most essential question: was October 1917 a totalitarian coup d'état or a socially liberating uprising? Critical, because there is nothing less useful than an apologetic reading of history. While vigorously reasserting the legitimacy of the Russian Revolution, Ernest Mandel also sets out to identify the critical mistakes that the Bolshevik leadership made in the period 1917-21. This is a valuable contribution to the discussion of the lessons to be learnt from the history of Bolshevism.
Ernest Mandel was active in the revolutionary socialist movement from the late 1930s until his death in 1995, and participated in the struggle against the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Successively editor of La Gauche, a member of the economic studies commission of the General Confederation of Labour of Belgium, and a leading figure of the independent radical left, he taught at the Free University of Brussels. He was the author of many books, including Marxist Economic Theory, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, Late Capitalism and Long Waves of Capitalist Development, as well as IIRE Notebook no. 1, The Place of Marxism in History .
Do the Workers Have a Country?
José Iriarte 'Bikila'IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 16 (48pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
Marxism has contributed much to the understanding of the national question: its class dynamics, its relationship to internationalism, its political importance and the importance of the slogan of self-determination. Lenin's role in this was particularly significant. But José Iriarte 'Bikila' thinks we should also take other theorists into account, like the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer and the Irish socialist and patriot James Connolly. Above all, it is important to re-examine a number of issues in the light of contemporary experience. In what circumstances can there be a fusion of Marxist and nationalist traditions? What is the particularity of an oppressed nation in advanced capitalist Europe? Should the borders of a radical left party necessarily be the same as those of the existing states? What is the present significance of independence?
José lriarte 'Bikila' was born in 1945. His thinking on the national question has drawn on his personal involvement and intimate knowledge of the struggle of the Basque people. In 1964 he joined the ranks of the pro-independence organization ETA, leaving in 1973 as part of a current that took part in a regroupment of the radical left. In 1991 he helped found the independent Basque revolutionary organization Zutik.
From the PCI to the PDS
Livio MaitanIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 15 (48pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
In 1991 the Italian Communist Party completed its long process of social-democratization. For many years the PCI was proud of its 'communist identity' and even of its 'diversity' in the context of the national political system and the European left. For several decades it was not only the main force of the Italian workers' movement but also the biggest Communist party in the capitalist West. But at its last congress in Rimini it abandoned its historic name and took that of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). At the end of such an itinerary a balance sheet is necessary. In From the PCI to the PDS, Livio Maitan looks at some key moments in PCI history and underlines the problems and contradictions that prepared the conditions for its final turn.
Livio Maitan, born in Venice in 1923, has been active in the ltalian workers' movement since the beginning of the Second World War. A national organizer of the Socialist Youth at the Liberation, he broke with social democracy in 1947. Since 1991 he has been in the leadership of the Party of Communist Refoundation. He has taught sociology at the University of Rome and translated and introduced almost all the ltalian editions of Trotsky's writings. His works in English include Party, Army and Masses in China (1976).
