Notebooks for Study and Research

A new book published by the IIRE brings together classic writings on the Russian revolution together with introductions by D Rayner O'Connor Lysaght, a veteran supporter of the Fourth International in Ireland and a noted revolutionary historian. Titled "October Readings: the development of the concept of Permanent Revolution", the volume is the latest book in our series "Notebooks for Study and Research".

The IIRE has just published Strategies of Resistance & ‘Who Are the Trotskyists?’, a collection of works by IIRE Fellow Daniel Bensaïd including his history of Trotskyism, newly translated into English by Nathan Rao. This 182-page book has been published in cooperation with Resistance Books. The introduction by Paul Le Blanc gives a flavour of the contents:

This summer marks IIRE’s thirtieth anniversary. In commemoration of the occasion, the latest issue of IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research is dedicated to covering the origins, activities and highlights of the Institute’s three decades of existence.

 'Living our Internationalism' is a history of the Institute edited by co-founder Joost Kircz and former director Murray Smith. The book will be launched at a dinner for IIRE staff and volunteers at the IIRE on March 25, and is already available online.

The credit crunch of 2008 produced an international recession in 2009. In this new book Claudio Katz and Michel Husson, both fellows of the International Institute for Research and Education, and SSP activist Raphie de Santos lead an attempt not to only to describe the present crisis, but also to understand its causes and debate socialist solutions.  

This 216-page book brings together much of the most powerful socialist analysis of the recession.

In this 144-page collection of essays, some of the world's most dynamic progressive thinkers discuss how to change the world: including John Holloway, Daniel Bensaid , and Michael Lowy.

Brazilian socialists André Passos Cordeiro, Ubiratan de Souza, Pepe Vargas, Raul Pont and João Machado describe in The Porto Alegre Alternative how Porto Alegre's participatory budget was born, how it works, how it developed in interaction with popular movements and spread with local Workers' Party (PT) victories, and how it has staked out new ground in promising a radically democratic alternative in the interests of the poor to top-down political and economic decision-making.

The US shift towards "unlimited war" precipitated by the events of 11 September 2001 was long in the making. Gilbert Achcar traces the rise of militant, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to its roots in US policies aimed at control ling the oil reserves of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, the "Muslim Texas". He examines the disintegration of class-ridden societies in the Middle East today and shows how these processes are rooted in the interests and policies of US imperialism. The US war on terrorism is raising this disintegration to new heights of destruction and disorder.

In this clear and concise overview, Robert Went refutes the myth that globalization is an entirely new phenomenon and an unavoidable process. While recognizing that globalization poses serious strategic challenges to progressive movements, he argues that these challenges are not insurmountable and that there is hope for real change. Viewing globalization in its historic perspective, Went argues that there can be no return to the postwar mode of expansion, but that the current trend must be altered.

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.