Daniel Singer

The French Winter of Discontent

On November 15 1995 Alain Juppe, the arrogant French Prime Minister, presented his plan to parliament for mastering expenditure on welfare, and particularly on national health. His proposed reform of the social services would, among other things, give him powers to act by decree and to transfer control of social services to parliament, away from bodies controlled jointly by employers and employees. He did not know, nor did anyone else, that he would precipitate one of those French upheavals which, while not necessarily shaking up the world, always give it plenty to think about. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Class Struggle in Poland: Notes on a Historic Compromise

It looked like the signing of a peace treaty between two sovereign powers. It was nearly 5 p.m. on that Sunday when—amid flashes of cameras and the noise of the recorders—the two main protagonists, their brief speeches over, signed the 21-point protocol. True, the setting was not very typical of diplomatic occasions. The ceremony was being held in the Lenin Shipyards and beamed through loudspeakers to thousands of workers standing outside. Nor was it a traditional peace treaty; it was a truce in Polands class struggles which Mieczyslaw Jagielski, a deputy prime minister, signed on behalf of the ruling establishment and Lech Walesa for the MKS, i.e., the inter-factory strike committee of the Gdansk region, standing on this occasion for the working class of Poland. The date was August 31, 1980, a date to remember.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Why We Need A New Manifesto

We need a new manifesto. Not a blueprint, not a detailed program. But a project, the vision of a different society, the proof that history has not come to an end, that there is a future beyond capitalism. We need it badly because its absence is the main weapon of our enemies. The nickname of Maggie Thatcher, TINA (There Is No Alternative) is the foundation on which their mighty propaganda machine rests.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Their Ideology and Ours

Review of The Power of Ideology by Istvan Meszaros.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Intelligentsia and Soviet Change

Review of Revolution from Above: Where is the Soviet Union Going? by Tariq Ali; The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present by Boris Kagarlitsky.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Wither the Soviet Union

Can radical reforms from above prevent a revolution, an upheaval from below? This classical question must now be applied to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a whole. And it must be answered within a historical context. I ask the readers forgiveness in advance if my summaries, definitions, and propositions, aimed simply at starting a debate, sound and really are oversimplified.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Revolution is But a Beginning

Review of Post-Revolutionary Society by Paul M. Sweezy. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Weakness and Potentialities of the Dissident Movement

A century ago Russian tsardom seemed terrorized by a handful of rebels. Today, the Soviet rulers give the impression of not being unduly worried by their dissidents, despite the echo their protests arouse around the world. The reason for this declining power of the dissident intelligentsia cannot be quantitative. Without entering here into a semantic argument about the definition of the intelligentsia, it is obvious that the educated strata from which it is recruited have grown fantastically in the meantime. On the eve of the October Revolution, among the people employed in Russia barely 190,000 specialists had graduated from a university or technical college. By 1976 their number had grown to 24 million. The superior efficiency of a modern totalitarian state, compared with the clumsy cruelty of tsarist repression, cannot on its own explain the political weakness of this new intelligentsia. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.