Class Struggle and Technological - Change in Japan since 1945

Muto Ichiyo

IIRE 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.

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.

Market, Plan and Democracy

The Experience of the So-Called Socialist Countries

Catherine Samary

IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 7/8 (64pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)

The collapse of the USSR highlighted the dead-end of the sort of planning practised under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But is the only alternative to bureaucratically planned 'command economies' the 'free market'. Rejecting this false choice, Catherine Samary explains that the debate is meaningless unless it is linked to the goal of emancipation. 'We must reject not only dogma', she writes, 'but also the intellectual terrorism that would have its totally acritical view of the market pass for creative innovation; we must lift the veil on both the market (whether dubbed "socialist" or not) and the bureaucratic plan, and expose every exploitative and oppressive social relation associated with them.' Plan, Market and Economy explains convincingly why every attempt to reform East Bloc economies by adding doses of the market or self-management ultimately failed, and why Samary believes that thorough-going economic democracy remains a real alternative. Catherine Samary is an economist, a research associate at the Institut du Monde Soviétique et d'Europe Centrale et Orientale (IMSECO), and a lecturer at the University of Paris-IX, Dauphine. She has studied Yugoslavia for many years and made a number of trips there. Among her many studies on the country are: her doctoral thesis at the University of Nanterre (1986); a book, Le Marché Contre L'Autogestion: L'Expérience Yougoslave (1988); and numerous articles published in a range of periodicals, including several in Le Monde Diplomatique. An IIRE Fellow, Samary is also the author of no. 19/20, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia. 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.

The Formative Years of the Fourth International (1933-38)

Daniel Bensaïd

IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 9 (48 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)

A new problem was posed to the movement for socialist democracy in the 1930s. To its fight against capitalism, it now had to add a fight against Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR. In The Formative Years of the Fourth International, Daniel Bensaïd outlines the arguments that led part of this movement to found an independent international organization. He unravels the historical reasons, conjunctural prognoses and organizational choices behind the decision, showing in particular that the foundation of the Fourth International in 1938 concluded a prolonged attempt to regroup many anti-Stalinist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist currents, beginning in 1933. Due to the concrete conditions of the 1930s, however, the regroupment failed to broaden the Fourth Internationalist current significantly.

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 is an IIRE Fellow and teaches sociology at the University of Paris. 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).