The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder
Gilbert AchcarIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 33/34 (128 pp., €15.00, £10.00, $15.99)
The US shift towards "unlimited war" precipitated by the events of 11 September 2001 was long in the making. Gilbert Achcar traces the rise of militant, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to its roots in US policies aimed at control ling the oil reserves of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, the "Muslim Texas". He examines the disintegration of class-ridden societies in the Middle East today and shows how these processes are rooted in the interests and policies of US imperialism. The US war on terrorism is raising this disintegration to new heights of destruction and disorder.
IIRE Fellow Gilbert Achcar lived in Lebanon until moving to France and most recently Berlin, where he is a researcher in social sciences at the Centre Marc Bloch. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, editor of The Legacy of Ernest Mandel and author of several books, including the forthcoming Eastern Cauldron.
'Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses
Robert WentIIRE/Pluto Press, Notebook for Study and Research no. 31/32 (170 pp., € 21.00, £13.99, $21.00)
In this clear and concise overview, Robert Went refutes the myth that globalization is an entirely new phenomenon and an unavoidable process. While recognizing that globalization poses serious strategic challenges to progressive movements, he argues that these challenges are not insurmountable and that there is hope for real change. Viewing globalization in its historic perspective, Went argues that there can be no return to the postwar mode of expansion, but that the current trend must be altered. If it is not, he warns of greater social inequality, levelling down of wages, a deterioration of working conditions, life-threatening ecological disasters and a pervasive dictatorship of the market. To combat this scenario, Went challenges the left to rebuild social movements and offer a credible alternative.
Robert Went is an economist and former IIRE co-director, currently working as a researcher at the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam and for The Netherlands Court of Audit.
Understanding the Nazi Genocide
Marxism after Auschwitz
Enzo TraversoIIRE/Pluto Press, Notebook for Study and Research no. 29/30 (154 pp., € 19.20, £12.99, $19.20)
Auschwitz was a pre-eminently modern genocide. If racial hatred was its first cause, its execution required a 'rationality' typical of modern capitalism. In this book on the slaughter of the European Jews in 1941-45, Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen. To faciliate this dialogue he draws on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism's pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organization and advanced technology. Traverso argues that after Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the choice we face is no longer between the progress of civilization and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilization and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.
Born in Italy, Enzo Traverso is former Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales of Paris and currently teaches political science at the Jules Verne University of Amiens. Two of his earlier books have been published in English: The Marxists and the Jewish Question (1994) and The Jews and Germany (1995).
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).
