Bookends
THE SOVIET bureaucracy appears increasingly torn between 'capitalist' reforms and centralised incrtia. This problem bureaucracy's historical predecessors, the tsarist autocracy. It is shorkingly apparent to the visitor to the Soviet Union (forget Spain and go there!) how the same old structures reasserted their presence in the bureaucratising backwash from 1917, Newly republished, Peter Kropotkin's Memors of a renolationist (Century Hurchinson, £6.95) sheds light on the options arising frum the previnus crisis of the ancien regime brought ahout by Tsar Alexander I's attempts to reform from above. ® Remember the MOVE incideut of May 1985? The MOVE commune — a group of radical black communes -occupied a fortified house in a "respectable' part of black Philadelphia. At dawn on 13 May 1985, the Philadelphia police, acting on orders of black mayor Nelson Goode, began their assault. The attack culminated at 5:25pm when a large improvised bomb was dropped from a police helicopter onto the roof of the MOVE building. It demolished the house and started a fire which destroyed 6i more houses in the strect. Eleven MOVE memhers, six adults and five children, were killed in che bombing. Only une adult and a thirtenyear-old survived. Attention, Mow! Tins ir America/ by Margot Harry (Bauner Press, (5.95) is a detailed account of the MOVE bombing and the subsequent trial of the only adult survivor, Ramona Africa, for aggravated assault on police officers and resisting arrest! After conducting her own defence she was found guity and sentenced to up to seven years in prison. • Onto high theory: A collection of Claus Offe's essays: Disorganised capitalim — contemporary transformations of coori and pouties (Basil Blackwell, [8.95) is just our. Ode's work dovctails with the ideas of post-Althusserian 'structural functionalist marcists like. Lirpictz and lellow Germans, Hirsch and Essen, and their attempts to construct a new abstract idcal rype of post-Fordism". As expected it's fairly indigestible fare. Some of the phenomena he addresses, however, notably increased differentiation and cleavages in the labour market, are in urgent need of examination from a revolutionary standpoint, For this reason 1 suggest at least some of you give this a try. especially the first essay The political coonomy of the lahour SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no B July/Sephember 1985