Workers' Liberty 2/1, September 2001

Review: Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West by Susan Buck-Moors

Stalinism and capitalism in the 20th century, according to Susan Buck-Morrs, were driven by parallel “dreamworlds”. “Stalin’s First and Second Five Year Plans amounted to the largest technological transfer in Western capitalist history... [Most] design and layout [of new factories]... was American, probably one-half of the equipment installed was German. Of this, a large amount was manufactured in Germany to American design on Soviet account. In quantity, American-built equipment was probably second and British third...” It was paid for by selling artworks previously owned by the Russian...

Review: 'The Road to Terror' and 'Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin'

Marx noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that the bourgeois crisis of mid-nineteenth-century France was resolved in the cry: “Rather an end with terror than terror without end.” Stalinism was an end with terror, as a new book of light commentary and heavy reproduction of documents confirms. In The Road to Terror, Getty and Naumov assemble a wide array of top-secret dossiers, letters, police reports, confessions, confirmations and transcripts of meetings recently made accessible by the opening of previously closed once-Soviet archives. They detail Stalin’s role as architect of...

Feeding the German Eagle

The bulk of this volume is an examination of the economic talks between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR in 1939-41, while Stalin remained “neutral” and Hitler was at war with the West. They ended with the German attack on the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. As Ericson puts it, “Nazi Germany turned to bite the hand that had fed it for the past twenty-two months.” Hitler described the signing of his pact with Stalin on 23 August 1939 as “the saddest day” of his life. But without his trade deals with Stalin, the Nazi war machine would have been in extreme difficulty. For example, Nazi Germany...

Review: Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel

In 1610, Galileo Galilei, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “abolished Heaven” — by proving the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that the Church’s entire theory of the cosmos, based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, was false. By pointing his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he proved the celestial spheres were not immutable. Some Church astronomers refused to look. Eventually he was accused of heresy. Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, recently dramatised on Channel Four, has written a fascinating biography of the man Einstein called the father of modern science. She has chosen also to deal with...

Review: Alas, Poor Darwin: arguments against evolutionary psychology by Steven and Hilary Rose

Alas, Poor Darwin, assembling articles from biologists, sociologists and others, takes exception to the excessive claims of evolutionary theory (EP) — the theory that human behaviour must be understood in terms of adaptations caused by natural selection (so that we are, basically, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers). Geneticist Gabriel Dover swiftly dispatches the gene-centred version of evolution put forward by Richard Dawkins. Stephen Jay Gould defends himself from the “slurs and sneers” of American philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Anne Fausto-Sterling gives a...

Review: Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Toni Negri was the most celebrated intellectual of Italy’s “ultra-left” in the 1970s. He was jailed in 1979 for “armed insurrection against the powers of the State”; won freedom in 1983 by getting elected to Parliament; fled to France in 1983; and has been back in jail, in Italy, since 1997. His new book, Empire written with an American academic, Michael Hardt, analyses the world of “globalisation”. They see it as all-encompassing, oppressive, but containing potentials for liberation. “The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means opposed to the...

The left must unite Europe

Those who cry against a European single currency, that it would mark a fundamental “surrender” of British sovereignty, are correct. It would. A single currency will be a giant step in the direction of European unity and a decisive move towards the creation of a European state. Europe has already achieved an irreversible though uneven and incomplete level of economic integration and unity. “Europe” already determines much of what happens within the member states of the European Union. The question is not whether there will be a united Europe, but, what sort of European unity? The creation of a...

Socialists in the 2001 General Election

The Socialist Alliance in the June 2001 General Election gave voters in 98 constituencies the chance to vote for "socialism" and against New Labour. On average, 1.62% of the people who voted in each constituency did so. We have something to congratulate ourselves for in having organised such a widespread public challenge to Blairism. The Socialist Alliance has little else to congratulate itself for. With very few exceptions our impact on the electorate was not noticeably greater than that which any half-way presentable socialist candidate would have made in any suitable constituency at any...

The experience of the French left in elections

In France, unlike Britain, municipal elections attract as much interest as national polls. In the municipal elections of 11 and 18 March 2001, there was a higher turnout (66% at the second round) than in Britain’s general election of June 2001; and the revolutionary left scored impressively. Lutte Ouvrière (LO) averaged 4.37% over 128 municipalities, and elected 33 municipal councillors. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), standing in a variety of lists under titles like “100% on the left”, got 36 municipal councillors, and those lists, 91 of them, averaged 4.52%. There were 175...

The New Turn of the SWP

“Sometimes differentiation is essential if a revolutionary organisation is to survive in an unfavourable political environment... In the 1980s... the SWP [took] refuge in the Marxist tradition as protection against the right-wing climate in society” (Alex Callinicos SWP internal document). “The SWP tailored its approach accordingly, placing a high priority on insulating its members from the rightward drift in the movement, and stressing the virtues of the revolutionary tradition as a bulwark against pessimism and defeatism” (John Rees, International Socialism no.90). But now, so the SWP says...

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