book announcement

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 22:50:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Loren R Goldner <lgoldner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Edmond Caldwell <bronterre@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Book Announcement

Queequeg Publications (Cambridge MA USA) announces the
first book in the Marx/Third Millennium Series:

Loren Goldner.

UBU SAVED FROM DROWNING:

CLASS STRUGGLE AND STATIST CONTAINMENT IN PORTUGAL AND SPAIN,
1974-1977.

        Little remembered today, the worker insurgencies in Portugal and

Spain at the end of the Salazar and Franco dictatorships were, for a
brief
moment in the mid-1970's, at the center of world politics. They occurred

in the midst of the 1973-1975 crisis of world accumulation, in which
capitalism was "changing gears" from the era of the big factory and the
assembly line to the era of "globalization", de-industrialization,
outsourcing, downsizing and "just in time", the era in which we live
today. They took place in a conjuncture that included thedeepest
economic
downturn (to date) since the end of World War II, the oil crisis, the
advance of "Euro-communism", the U.S. defeat in Indochina, the triumph
of
"national liberation fronts" in the ex-Portuguese colonies of Angola,
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, and the crisis in the Horn of Africa.
World
capitalism, centered in the U.S., seemed to be everywhere involved in
putting out fires, but the Iberian insurgencies were unique among these
simultaneous crises in being centered on the working class, and
particularly in the case of Portugal, directly posing the question of
the
state and unmasking the pretensions of different factions of
"progressive"
state bureaucrats. They were the most genuinely radical moments of the
(mainly statist) "red mirage" that, briefly, seemed to have placed world

capitalism on the defensive. By the late 70's, capitalism had returned
to
the offensive, and the era of Thatcher and Reagan inaugurated a rollback

that swept away leftist statism, up to and including the Soviet Union
itself.

        What was ending was the century of the "progressive" state
bureaucrat, who had entered the international workers' movement in the
German SPD and its 1875 Gotha Program, and who for 100 years seemed, in
"socialist" and "communist" guise, to represent something "beyond
capitalism". Events since 1975 have shown that the "progressive state
bureaucrat", everywhere from England to China, represented, rather,
something BEFORE capitalism, throwing the old statist "left" into
terminal
crisis. This book analyzes the last two Western worker revolts just
before
this turn, and shows how they already pointed toward a new era, although

hardly the immediately revolutionary era they seemed to portend.

        Now that the statist illusion of the revolutionary workers'
movement has been laid to rest once and for all, the Portuguese and
Spanish worker revolts of the mid-1970's offer one benchmark from which
to
judge present and future struggles.

ISBN 0-970-03080-0
113 p.

To order, send a check or money order for $10 (US) to:

Queequeg Publications
PO box 441597
West Somerville MA 02144
USA

Add $1 for US domestic book rate; $2 for US first class; $3 for
international air mail.








--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx