Notebooks for Study and Research

In 1991 the Italian Communist Party completed its long process of social-democratization. For many years the PCI was proud of its 'communist identity' and even of its 'diversity' in the context of the national political system and the European left. For several decades it was not only the main force of the Italian workers' movement but also the biggest Communist party in the capitalist West. But at its last congress in Rimini it abandoned its historic name and took that of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). At the end of such an itinerary a balance sheet is necessary.

The Gulf War and the New World Order provides thorough analyses of the Gulf War from the invasion of Kuwait (August 1990) to the aftermath of operation 'Desert Storm' ( January/February 1991). It examines the war's meaning for the Third World and gives detailed assessments of Western policies and the changing scene in the Middle East.

In The Spanish Civil War in Euzkadi and Catalonia, Miguel Romero questions conventional history and tries to look at it from the point of view of the defeated and oppressed. This starting point makes it possible for him to show that the defeat of the revolutionaries in the republican camp (particularly in Catalonia in spring 1937) paved the way for Franco's victory. The originality of his study is the way in which it integrates the national question into its analysis of the civil war.

The current political relevance of the history of past revolutions is revealed in the ongoing polemics over the meaning of the French revolution of 1789 and the English revolution of 1640-60. The comparative study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions is also indispensable to analyzing the particularities of the various Western European states to which these revolutions gave birth. It is a necessary reference point, finally, for the study of revolutions in the Third World.

The emergence of revolutionary Christianity and liberation theology in Latin America opened a new chapter and posed exciting new questions. In Marxism and Liberation Theology, Michael Löwy argues that these developments demand a renewal of the Marxist analysis of religion.

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.

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. 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.

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.

Since the rise of capitalism, socialists have faced certain deep-seated obstacles: the hostility of the bourgeois state, the fitful curve of proletarian class-consciousness, and the inertia or active opposition of apparatuses originally built by the workers for struggle. Daniel Bensaïd reviews the answers to these problems given in the 'classical' period of the Marxist movement.