From this experience, Ireland learned that legal rights alone are insufficient, that a movement is necessary to guarantee that these rights are enforced. She also learned that in solving her individual problem, she could help large numbers of women. Her success in forcing Pan Am to pay for her husband's dental work inspired Ireland to enter law school. There, whether protesting a sexist law text, a sexist guest lecturer, or a discriminatory service club, she learned another important lesson-the importance of collective action: "We didn't abolish slavery, we didn't win the right to vote, first for African American men and then for all women, because we had a few good men in the Congress or in the White House or on the Court, but because we had strong individuals and strong movements that demanded change. "Now it is our turn to continue. We have the ability and the respon34 International Viewpoint book notes sibility not only to take control over our lives, but literally to change the course of history." Some serious omissions
This book does not purport to be a history of the women's movement. Although this is understandable in an autobiography by the NOW president, it leads to a one-sided picture of NOW's early history. Although Ireland mentions other groups and stresses the value of coalitions, there are some serious omissions. Ireland describes her experiences speaking out about her own illegal abortion without mentioning that, prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision-at a time when NOW was still reluctant to publicly support abortion rights-the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC) organized demonstrations, speak- outs, and tribunals.
Similarly, consciousness-raising groups, independent campus women's liberation groups, city-wide women's liberation groups, feminist newspapers and journals, radical feminist collectives, and the self-help groups that later grew into battered women's shelters and rape crisis centers are largely ignored.
Ireland doesn't ignore NOW's original hesitation to embrace lesbian rights and lesbian-baiting within the organization. She points out that homophobia is used to keep women in line regardless of their sexual orientation, Similarly, Ireland discusses the problem of red-baiting. Although she doesn't detail the extent to which the NOW leadership has employed red-baiting, she acknowledges that it has been a problem and describes her own positive experiences working with members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) on clinic defense and protests against police brutality while she was in Dade County NOW
Ireland also describes the way Miami right-wingers used red-baiting coupled with physical violence to intimidate all prog ressives. She explains her own initial fear and hesitation to speak out on behalf of free speech for supporters of the Cuban Revolution. She doesn't duck the role of U.S foreign policy: graphically describing persecution faced by women under U.S.-supported dictatorships. Rather than rely on statistics, she personalizes this violence by describing the work of one woman she met and her subsequent torture and murder. Emphasis on electoral politics
Ireland doesn't ignore the continuing betrayal by "friendly" Democrats or the power of an independent mass movement. But she continually subordinates this power to electoral politics. At times it almost seems as if Ireland is arguing with herself, trying to convince herself that this electoral approach is correct despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. She describes her early desire to run for elected office: "I wanted to change the system that caused so much suffering, and one way of doing it-a way that might just be best for me-was to run for elected office."
She changed her mind when she realized she would have more real power and influence as a leader of NOW than as a Florida state legislator. Ireland details NOW's support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the campaign that transformed NOW into the largest, most significant national feminist organization. She correctly points to the many discriminatory laws that the ERA would abolish and its economic benefits for women. In her description, however, she omits the shift from mass demonstrations to electoral efforts. On the contrary, Ireland says, the demonstrations and educational efforts were also aimed at establishing a future electoral campaign network for what would overwhelmingly be to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
Ireland doesn't ignore the futility of this strategy. She names "friends" that NOW money and volunteers helped elect who then voted against the ERA. Yet, even as the ERA went down to defeat, doomed by this electoral strategy, she sees these efforts as positive. She asserts that later electoral "victories" resulted from the groundwork laid during the ERA campaign. Ireland claims that the betrayals by many male "friends" in the ERA campaign led to the creation of the "Feminization of Power campaign; that is, instead of trying to influence those in power, tobecome those in power. Again, she proudly points to NOW's "success" in this area-only to have women candidates (mostly Democrats) elected with NOW money and volunteers also stab them in the back. This was demonstrated recently by the women members of Congress who voted to throw millions of children deeper into poverty by voting for the so-called welfare reform bill.
NOW didn't "endorse" Clinton in 1992. Instead, they actively campaigned for various female candidates under the slogan "Elect Women for a Change." Ireland admits that the result was to increase Clinton's vote total. This strategy was modeled after similar efforts in state elections where a particularly reprehensible candidate wasn't endorsed while efforts were made to turn out a large vote for a "good" candidate for a lesser office, knowing that these voters would also vote for the head of the ticket as a "lesser Defending women's clinics
Explaining that if we can control our reproductive rights, we can control our lives,
Ireland discusses the need for actively defending clinics from assaults by Operation Rescue goons. Yet, she portrays this as a short-term solution, subordinate to the long term solution of court actions. Ireland answered critics within the women's movement who question the value of the massive pro-choice demonstrations NOW has initiated: "There are solid reasons for doing mass actions. We use them to organize and to inspire. A mass action builds our strength and our momentum - and shows that strength to politicians and to ourselves." She added that these actions also provide a pool of volunteers to turn out the vote and lobby politicians.
This book tells its readers, a long way, but we still have a long way to go." It shows women that their problems aren't caused by some individual failing or bad luck, but result from systematic sexual discrimination. And, more important, it urges them not to accept the status quo, but to take control of their own lives and engage in activity that can make a positive change for all women. Ireland sums up: *I want us to move forward and to continue fighting for justice in those areas where triumph has so far eluded us. I want us to feel the urgency of taking action now to prevent the loss of everything we've gained over the past 30 years of progress and struggle." Given the current intensity of the bipartisan attacks against working people, women, minorities. immigrants, and children, Ireland will certainly have ample opportunity to back up her What Women Want. Dutton, 1996, 323 pp. This review is reprinted from Socialist Action (US), October 1996 Lean Production: a Capitalist Utopia? Tony Smith reviewed by Thomas Coutrot In the "notebook" series of the Amsterdambased International Institute for Research and Education (IRE), Tony Smith offers us a well-documented critique of the theses that "lean production" (translated into French as "la production flexible") makes it possible to overcome, in a lasting way, the contradictions
This is high quality work, based on a deep familiarity with the international literature on this subject. Tony Smith uses the conceptual tools of Marxism in a very pedagogical way, in order to show how these innovations in no way abolish the structural contradiction between capital and labour. Instead, "lean production" re-creates these contradictions, in a new form.
This is a remarkably clear and well-documented text, which reviews contemporary developments. It is highly recommended, and stimulating reading, and an excellent synthesis for the non-specialised reader.
The problem is that lean production theory can be demolished using the critique which Marxists make against capital, whatever the historical period. Curiously, Smith seems to have missed the target. Nowadays there are very few writers who claim that lean production makes it possible to go beyond capitalism. The thesis we ought to be attacking is the suggestion that lean production could make it possible to launch a new period of long term capitalist growth.
Although Smith mentions Ernest Mandel in his bibliography, he doesn't refer to the Belgian Marxist's work on long waves of boom and slump. Indeed, Smith avoids the very concept of long waves. He explicitly rejects all "regulationist" approaches.
This is a common attitude among excessively "orthodox" Marxists. Frightened of suggesting that a reformist alternative might be possible, they don't want to even consider the possibility that capitalism could be capable of regenerating itself and rebuilding viable social structures which will permit continued accumulation.
Since he refuses to ask the question, Smith can hardly convince us that the answer is "no". This obviously weakens the impact
Could lean production be the support for a new long wave of expansion? Capitalism has regained a historically high average rate of profit. A new model for the extraction of surplus value is being introduced. In that it reinforces control over labour while simultaneously partially liberating labour's capacity for initiative, this model is more efficient than Fordism. So, given all this, why is there no new dynamic of durable growth?
To answer questions like these, you need to stop concentrating on the sphere of production, and look at the global configuration of the new regimes of industrial and financial accumulation, and the relationship between private accumulation and the public sphere. As you do so, you begin to realise that neo-liberalism, even when re-enforced by the most innovative forms of lean production, does not offer the possibility of credible, long term growth. On the contrary, the persistence of neo-liberalism goes hand in hand with the aggravation of social contradictions and conflicts. But to prove this to people we need to go beyond generalities about the capitalist mode of production, however true they are, and bite into the question of specific modes of capitalist production, in their historical context. Let's hope that, in his future work, Tony Smith touches on this. Tony Smith replies...
I am very grateful to Thomas Coutrot for his generous review. I would like to acknowledge that much of the credit for whatever is of worth in the monograph goes to comrades working of the front lines of the struggles against lean production, especially those associated with the newsletter Labor Notes.
Certain criticisms made in the review are
The monograph does not examine the global dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the political strategy of neoliberalism, nor the role of the tinancial reviews * sector. My only defense is that it was not possible to talk about everything in a
I am less sure about other objections. Coutrot asserts that I "missed the target" because no one today believes lean produc tion goes beyond capitalism. But as he elsewhere notes, my target was not the claim that lean production transcends capitalism, but the quite different thesis that lean production is a form of capitalism with the potential to abolish many antagonisms between capital and labor, capital and consumers, and among units of capital. And this thesis is still being proclaimed in the popular and scholarly business press, the bourgeois academic community, and in factories and offices where lean production is being introduced.
Coutrot claims that my account is incompatible with long wave theory, and lumps me with "orthodox" Marxists who have difficulty appreciating capitalism's ability to re-
This is puzzling, given statements such as the following, in the book: "(T)he epoch of Fordism appears to be coming to a close. We now appear to be in the midst of a transitional period, in which a new variant of capitalism is gradually taking shape." (p. 9)
It is completely consistent to accept criticisms of the regulationist school and still hold that capitalism develops in long waves in which technologies and forms of social organization holding sway in one wave give way to new technologies and social forms.
The most important issue raised in the review is whether lean production could in principle be part of a solution to low growth rates. In a manner perhaps in tension with his criticism of "orthodox" Marxists, Coutrot denies that this could be the case. I am not so sure a definitive judgement is possible at this time. As Ernest Mandel argued, the start of an expansionary wave does not depend simply upon the availability of new technologies and forms of social organization; a myriad of contingent factors play a role as well, especially those connected to class struggle. Among these contingencies is the extent to which the ideology of lean production infects the working class and its allies. This is why I thought it worthwhile to establish that the promises proclaimed by advocates of lean production can only be fulfilled in socialism. But Coutrot is correct to insist that this is part of a much bigger story, and that much remains to be done in response to the restructuring of capital. Tony Smith<tonys@iastate.edu> [Review of the French edition, published as La production flexible, une utopie capitaliste?. IRF. 1996 Lean Production: A Capitalist Utopia, Amsterdam. 1994, ISSN 0298-7902. To order, send a British. Frenci or US cheque for £5/$6.20/35FF payable to P. Rouser 1i IIRE, PB 53290, 1007 RG Amsterdam To order the books and magazines national Viewpoint, try your store, contact the publishers Brèche, 9 rue de Tunis, 75011 43 67 63 57 fax 43 79 29 61 Spanish spoken). Where no pr you enclose a donation of USS currency to cover the postage announce your pu sample copy to Viewpoint, PECI, BP 85
News From Within February 1997 includes: Hebron Agreement • Palestinian youth movement (Islah Jad) • Poverty among Palestinians in Israel • National Service for Arabs in Israel • Mordechai Vanunu • Palestinians in Lebanon • The Palestinian national movement: no land strategy (Adel Samara) • Book reviews on The Bund, Zionism and the Nazis, and Deception and reality in Palestine: a book by Felicia Langer Available from the AIC, PO Box 31417, Jerusalem. UNRWA - Between Refugee Aid and well read complete review ot the radical press
Seminar on the October Revolution Following the July 1996 seminar on Ernest Mandel's Contribution to Marxist Thought, the Ernest Mandel Study Centre will either organize or coorganize a seminar (in English and French) on the October 1917 revolution. It will be held either as a larger-scale colloquium with a broad range of international sponsors and participants in Belgium or on a more modest scale in Amsterdam. * Postbus 53290, 1007 RG Amsterdam, Netherlands 0 31 20 6717263, Fax: 6732106 eMail IIRE@Antenna.nl
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