IIRE Cahiers d' Étude et de Recherche

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.

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.

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.

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.

Few concepts have such a controversial history as the one of “permanent revolutionˮ. Formulated for the first time by Marx, it was redeveloped by Trotsky during the Russian revolution of 1905 as the foundation of his predicting the proletarian revolution of October 1917.

The Chinese revolution of 1949 was one of the most important experiences in the history of twentieth-century national liberation movements. It triggered wide-ranging debates among, and often inside, revolutionary currents around the world.