INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR
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Lean Production: A Capitalist sales
Utopia?
byTony Smith
Nederlands
• Innovative ways of organising proofreading production and marketing are eliminating antagonisms between capital and labour, between producers and
Hrvatski consumers, and between different companies. "Lean production" is uniting artwork companies, workers and consumers in the harmonious persuit of common interests.
• Too good to be true? Of course it is!.
We need your
In this pamphlet, Tony Smith analyses the current transformation of help!
relationships between employers and employees, between producers and consumers, and between different firms, and shows that, fundamentaly they have not altered the nature of
International capitalism.
• The author goes on to show how a
Viewpoint socialist economy based on grassroots participation and democratic seeks young coordination could match the dynamism of lean production, and keep lean and production's broken promises of cooperation and harmony.
ambitious
Tony Smith is professor of philosophy at lowa State University in the U.S.A. and troublean advisory editor of the magazine
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Obituary Lou Guohua (Lou Kuohua) alias Zi Chun, Yi Ding, Shao Yuan, Ze Cheng, who died on 8 March. by Wang Fanxi Lou Guohua joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1927. Two years later he also joined the country's first Trotskyist organisation, "Womende hua" (Our Word). A delegate to the 1931 founding conference of the Left Opposition in the CCP, Lou Guohua was arrested (along with almost all the newly-elected Executive Committee) by Chiang Kai-Shek's political police. Freed from prison in 1935, he continued his work in the Shanghai Trotskyist movement, and fied to Hong Kong when the Maoist army arrived in 1949. He weathered the repression of the late 50s, when Hong Kong's Trotskyists were deported, and our literature suppressed. He founded the "Sincere Press" (Xinda chubanshe) publishing house, which published over a dozen titles. It was mainly through his contacts and influence that those Hong Kong youth who inclined to Anarchism in the 1970s, and gathered round the "Seventies Society (Qiling niandai) were won to Trotskyism. He was one of the leading members of the Revolutionary Marxist League they formed. Lou was a professional revolutionary, but also a revolutionary with a profession. That is not to say he was an amateur or part-time revolutionary, but simply that he always had a job at the same time as working for the revolution. All genuinely revolutionary organisations in poor countries have known hardship that comrades in the developed countries, and even young Chinese radicals in Hong Kong today find hard to imagine. The Chinese Trotskyist movement had known particular hardship. There were no donations, no dues, and no contributions whatsoever. Lou Guohua was a one-man fund raiser for Chinese Trotskyism. He was exceedingly frugal, and saved from his income (he usually worked as a salaried accountant) to help other comrades. For example, when comrade Li Cailian died in the winter of 1938, it was Lou who paid for her burial. Almost every member of the earlier generations of our comrades was in one way or another his beneficiary. Lou was also a brilliant author of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. He showed how China's Maoist authorities puffed up Lu Xun in order to obscure Chen Duxiu, modern China's best-known essayist and writer. Chen founded the CCP in 1921, but became a 'non-person' in 1931, because he was also the father of Chinese BI Trotskyism. Lou exposed the 1938 Maoist BI slander of Chen as an agent of Japan, which DI was comparable to Stalin's slander of Trotsky as a Hitler agent.
S Both Lou's theses have been confirmed by new materials published in China. Lou leaves a wife, a daughter and three sons. A supporter of the Fourth International until his
Al deat, he died loved and respected by the younger generation of Hong Kong radicals. C
U We will not forget him *
R
Printed by Helma v.o.s., Opletalova 40, Prague, Czech Republic. A monthly
Internationale (PECI), BP 85, 75522 Paris CEDEX 11, France.
International Viewpoint #265 April 1995 ha
France: the new militancy