Forthcoming Publications: An Alternative for Brazil?

New Achcar Anthology on Middle East

Luis Ignacio da Silva ("Lula")'s election and first months as president of Brazil hold a troubled mirror up to new radical generation around the world. Lula's Workers Party (PT) made Porto Alegre, Brazil, the world capital of the global justice movement by organizing the World Social Forum there three years in a row. From Porto Alegre the message went forth: there is an alternative to neoliberalism. The PT city administration in Porto Alegre itself seemed to embody that alternative, with an innovative "participatory budget" process that promised a radically democratic alternative, in the interests of the poor, to top-down political and economic decision-making.

Since Lula took office, however, he has devoted himself to building up a whopping budget surplus, guaranteeing the Central Bank's independence and cutting back on pensions. What kind of alternative does the PT really have to offer?

In the IIRE's upcoming Notebook for Study and Research no. 35-36, once again co-published as a book by Britain's Pluto Press, a number of left-wing PT activists argue that the "Porto Alegre" model does offer an alternative to capitalist politics as usual, but that President Lula unfortunately does not seem to have learned its lessons. In Direct Democracy: The Porto Alegre Experience, Brazilian socialists André Passos Cordeiro, Ubiratan de Souza, Pepe Vargas, Raúl Pont and João Machado describe how Porto Alegre's participatory budget was born, how it works, how it developed in interaction with popular movements and spread with local PT victories, and how it has staked out new ground in the tradition of the Paris Commune and the original Russian soviets.

As editor Iain Bruce writes, the participatory budget's linkage of socialism and direct democracy takes up "an inescapable task for those seeking to restate the case for socialism in the twenty-first century, in an idiom that makes sense to the new generations coming to politics after Seattle and the immense movement against war in Iraq".

Eastern Cauldron

While working with Iain Bruce on Direct Democracy, NSR series editor Peter Drucker is also continuing his work as a translator for Gilbert Achcar, whose The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder went out to Notebook subscribers last year. Monthly Review Press has now issued another translation by Drucker of Achcar's Eastern Cauldron. To order the book or read more about it, click on http://www.monthlyreview.org/easterncauldron.htm.

A collection of Achcar's writings on the Middle East over the past twenty years, including many articles originally published in the magazine International Viewpoint, Eastern Cauldron also includes an entirely new introduction surveying US policy in the Middle East over the past half century. The book lays bare the roots of Ariel Sharon's current brutal attack on the Palestinian people and the deepening quagmire the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan.