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Populism in Latin America
Adolfo Gilly, Helena Hirata, Michael Löwy , Carlos Vilas and the PRT (Argentina)IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 6 (40 pp. €3.25, £2, $3.25)
In most Latin American countries, workers have not formed independent political parties and trade unions. During much of the twentieth century large sections of the worker and peasant masses remained attached to populist parties, which at one point governed half the countries of the continent. But populist regimes' vulnerability to military coups, their inability to stop the drain of the foreign debt and the collapse of the 'economic miracles' they had presided over shook their power in one country after another. Many populist parties have subsequently sought closer links with the Socialist International. What kind of future is open to these parties in or after the triumph of democracy and neoliberalism in Latin America? The essays in Populism in Latin America analyze what made populism attractive and made its rule possible in three main countries of Latin America, and provide a basis for considering its future.
Adolfo Gilly is author of The Mexican Revolution, widely acclaimed as a major Marxist historical work. Helena Hirata is a Marxist sociologist and member of the Brazilian Workers Party. Michael Löwy is director of research in sociology at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and an IIRE Fellow. Carlos M. Vilas is an independent Argentinian Marxist and former economic adviser to the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. The Argentinian PRT (Revolutionary Workers Party) pamphlet was written in 1972-73, at a time when the party was led by people like Roberto Santucho and Daniel Pereyra and embodied their generation's identification with the Cuban revolution.
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Revolutionary Strategy Today
Daniel BensaïdIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 4 (36 pp. €3.25, £2, $3.25)
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Since the rise of capitalism, socialists have faced certain deep-seated obstacles: the hostility of the bourgeois state, the fitful curve of proletarian class-consciousness, and the inertia or active opposition of apparatuses originally built by the workers for struggle. Daniel Bensaïd reviews the answers to these problems given in the 'classical' period of the Marxist movement. He then examines them in light of events in Southern Europe and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, including the growth and diversification of the state, growing aspirations to self-management, multiple forms of dual power and the experience of left reformist governments.
Daniel Bensaïd was born in 1946. He was active in the French student and anti-imperialist movements that led up to May 1968. Drawing the lessons of the failure of the general strike, he emerged as one of the main advocates of building an independent radical left. He taught sociology at the University of Paris and was an IIRE Fellow until his death in 2010. His many published works include: Portugal: la révolution en marche (1975), Mai si! rebelles et repentis (with Alain Krivine, 1988), Le pari mélancolique (1997) and Les irréductibles: théorèmes de la résistance à l'air du temps (2001) and Strategies of Resistance (2009).
Class Struggle and Technological Innovation in Japan since 1945
Muto IchiyoIIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 5 (48 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)
In the 1980s, free enterprise ideologues often presented Japan as a model of social harmony and economic dynamism. The essays included in this Notebook describe the real situation of postwar Japanese workers and unravel the mechanisms of the apparent Japanese consensus, in many cases akin to authoritarian suppression of independent thinking. Moto Ichiyo explains how the strategic choices made by the labour movement in the 1950s and '60s laid the basis for the later rightward shift. In the framework of a Marxist analysis, he deals in original and dialectical fashion with the changing relations between the US and Japan, the links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the masses, and the effects of Japanese-style rationalization (gorika) on workers' power on the shop floor.
Moto Ichiyo is a collaborator of the English-language periodical AMPO: Japan-Asia Quarterly. As both participant in and witness of the rise, decline and crisis of the Japanese New Left, he has written many articles about the situation in Japan: the politics of the regime, various popular struggles and the labour movement.
