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The Cost of Neo-Liberal Europe
“Throughout the present decade, neo-liberal economic strategies—interacting with intense competitive pressures on world markets—have sought to remodel the capitalisms of Western Europe. In the context of mass unemployment the drive towards a renewed subordination of workforces has found unity and direction in the demand for labour flexibility, while . . .” read more
The Tragedy of the French Left
“In 1981 the French Left came to power for the first time in decades. Here was a Left which had never made peace with the consumer capitalism of the postwar period. The Communists, lesser partners in the new governing coalition, remained committed to the socialist transformation of France. . . .” read more
Labour in the Great City
“The giant city was a new phenomenon in Western capitalism, and a type of human settlement virtually unprecedented in the non-oriental world before the eighteenth century: that is to say, the city whose population was measured in several hundreds of thousands, and very soon in millions. Until the . . .” read more
The PCI and the Historic Compromise
“Few on the left will disagree with the view that the turn taken by events in Italy in recent years is deeply depressing. Capitalism is unquestionably more stable today than at any time since the boom years of the late 1950s, and the social and cultural upheavals of . . .” read more
A Reply to Gundle
“In Italy history repeats itself: a general election has been called one year early to avoid a referendum whose result might shake the political and economic establishment represented by the dc, iri and Confindustria. In 1987 nuclear power has taken on the importance of divorce in . . .” read more
After the West German Elections
“The political earthquake once widely predicted for the West German federal elections failed to take place on 25 January 1987. Six months earlier, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the centre–right coalition had barely managed to scrape home in the Lower Saxony elections, just thirty thousand votes ahead of . . .” read more
The PCI Congress
“The 17th Congress of the Italian Communist Party was held in Florence between 9 and 13 April, in the midst of Reagan’s first round of sabre-rattling against Libya and his authorization of a new nuclear test in Nevada. Since, as we shall see, the main peculiarity of the . . .” read more
Eco-Socialist Transition on the Threshold of the 21st Century
“It has become difficult to speak about socialism without some words of explanation. What are we talking about? How are we to justify our theses? I take it as an established result of much theoretical debate that socialism is not a state of affairs (that is, neither a . . .” read more
International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin
“Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . .” read more
Spanish Socialism in the Atlantic Order
“In March 1986, the first popular referendum on a military alliance in history was held in Spain. The ruling Socialist Party (psoe)—committed only four years earlier to withdrawal from nato—campaigned for Spanish integration into the Atlantic Alliance, deploying a massive battery of official manipulation, threats and . . .” read more
Judging the PCI
“We make our own history but never under conditions of our own choosing. Political parties are normally to a greater or lesser extent reflections of socioeconomic realities, even if occasionally, as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, they have been known to have lost contact with any reality outside their . . .” read more
How the French Left Learned to Love the Bomb
“The election of a Socialist, François Mitterrand, as President of the French Republic on 10 May 1981 aroused hopes in a European left that by the end of the seventies had to console itself as best it could. Mitterrand himself was, indeed, a Fourth Republic war-horse, a patriotic . . .” read more
The Rise and Decline of Southern European Socialism
“The rise of Southern European Socialist parties (sesp) to government was as sudden and dramatic as their subsequent shift away from social welfare policies and their declining influence. The image that the sesp projected before their ascent was one of youthful radicalism. In contrast to the . . .” read more
The Peace Movement and European Socialism
“A movement for peace and disarmament has exploded in Europe in these last months that has stupefied even those—like ourselves—who believed from the start in the possibility of building one, and worked to bring it about. There are many reasons for that stupor. First of all, there is . . .” read more
Eurocommunism: Left and Right Variants
“Fernando Claudin was a leader of the Spanish Communist Party until his expulsion in 1964, and is the author of the already classic The Communist Movement: from Comintern to Cominform. The analysis of Eurocommunism and its relation to socialism put forward in his new book is very timely—both . . .” read more
Revolutionary Strategy in Europe--A Political Interview
“The revolutionary Left, and especially the Fourth International, is often accused—for example, by the leaderships of the PdUPC in Italy or the PSU and CFDT in France—of mechanically superimposing onto the reality of the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe a ‘model’ derived from the Russian revolution: breakdown . . .” read more
Directions in Hell
“Geneva today is a town of 250,000 inhabitants. Its population 15 years ago was 195,000. Geneva is not an industrial centre: it is a centre of paper work, of contracts, deals, plans, treaties, agreements, reports. Most of these emanate from organizations dedicated in one way or another to . . .” read more
Immigration under Capitalism
“The authors of Immigrant Workers begin by observing that ‘The race relations approach has dominated research on immigration in Britain’. This approach has been mainly liberal in outlook, and frequently followed American models; ‘few British social scientists have paid any attention to . . . immigrants in the . . .” read more
The Left against Europe? (Special Issue)
“‘I imagine that by about the turn of the century something like a United States of Socialist Europe will exist. A timid and conservative prefiguration of these United States is naturally the Common Market, for even conservative, bourgeois politicians are beginning to sense that the nation state, at . . .” read more
The Function of Labour Immigration in Western European Capitalism
“The domination of the working masses by a small capitalist ruling class has never been based on violence alone. Capitalist rule is based on a range of mechanisms, some objective products of the economic process, others subjective phenomena arising through manipulation of attitudes. Two such mechanisms, which received . . .” read more
Immigrant Labour
“There is no Western European country where immigrant labour is a negligible force, or even a marginal quantity fluctuating with the economic conjuncture. Nowhere do immigrant workers provide simply a ‘regulator’ of employment, or merely an instrument for the bourgeoisie to increase the ‘industrial reserve army’. They comprise . . .” read more
Common Market Agriculture
“The difficulties which arise in the drafting of a ‘European’ agricultural policy are of interest because they illuminate the basic contradictions which exist within the Atlantic bloc, within the Common Market and within each of its member nations. These contradictions will not readily be resolved. But the way . . .” read more
The Dialectic of Class and Region in Belgium
“Belgian society today is a living illustration of the law of uneven development which has dominated the whole history of capitalism. The present structural crisis of the Belgian economy is a direct consequence of the fact that Belgium was the first industrialized country in continental Europe. The crisis . . .” read more
Introduction to Mandel on Belgium
“We open our series of comparative studies of the advanced capitalist countries in this issue, with Ernest Mandel’s analysis of the development of economy and society in Belgium from industrialization to the present day. The intention of the series is, in the first instance, to help overcome the . . .” read more
Continental Capitalism and the Common Market
“The crisis between England and France aroused intense anxiety in Europe about the future of the Common Market. In one way or another, all France’s partners appeared to be bent upon a rupture with her. Yet, after a pause of some days, the Brussels machinery was working normally . . .” read more
Post-War Britain and the Common Market
“If in the affairs of a man or a nation a time comes when all possible choices appear distasteful or fraught with grave danger, it is useful, indeed essential, to reflect on how one got into the embarrassment. Past choices, past mistakes, may well illuminate the problem more . . .” read more
Neutralism and the Common Market
“the blackpool Resolution on the Common Market leaves the matter open. As the facts which George Brown is waiting for are revealed one by one over the next months of negotiation we can either press our opposition to Britain’s entry or allow the concessions that will be . . .” read more