Notebooks for Study and Research

Auschwitz was a pre-eminently modern genocide. If racial hatred was its first cause, its execution required a 'rationality' typical of modern capitalism. In this book on the slaughter of the European Jews in 1941-45, Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen. To faciliate this dialogue he draws on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism's pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organization and advanced technology.

In Fatherland or Mother Earth? leading French Marxist Michael Löwy argues that the fragmentary writings on national issues by Marx and Engels have the potential to form the basis of a coherent theory, a truly international dialectic which yet remains to be developed. This theory draws on contributions from key thinkers such as Lenin and Otto Bauer.

In the 1970s and '80s a wave of industrialization contributed to the greatest political and social mobilization in South African history, of which the trade-union movement was one of the central driving forces. One particularly interesting current that emerged was the 'independent trade-union left' that played a key role in the birth of the union federation COSATU. In The Trade-Union Left and the Birth of a New South Africa, Claude Jacquin follows the political, social and economic changes that ultimately brought an end to apartheid.

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.

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'.

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.

The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia is a comprehensive report on the Yugoslav tragedy: a historical overview; a multi-disciplinary social study; an invitation to collective reflection; and a call for solidarity with those working for peace with justice for all the ex-Yugoslav communities. Author Catherine Samary shows the interaction of national and international, socio-economic and political, past and present factors at work. She concludes that the war could have been avoided.

Although it is no longer 'fashionable' to refer to it, the Russian Revolution remains a major experience of the twentieth century. Knowledge of it is indispensable to those who wish to understand the contemporary world, or to see clearly how to proceed in the fight for socialism. In October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social Revolution? Ernest Mandel sets out to analyze it in a polemical and critical essay.

Marxism has contributed much to the understanding of the national question: its class dynamics, its relationship to internationalism, its political importance and the importance of the slogan of self-determination. Lenin's role in this was particularly significant. But José Iriarte 'Bikila' thinks we should also take other theorists into account, like the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer and the Irish socialist and patriot James Connolly. Above all, it is important to re-examine a number of issues in the light of contemporary experience.