Factory Committees and Workers' Control in Petrograd in 1917

David Mandel

IIRE 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.

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.

Lean Production - A Capitalist Utopia?

Tony Smith

IIRE 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'.

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.