ers from state-owned enterprises Crisis of the state-owned The Chinese bureaucracy has deprived workers of their power to be master of the enterprise; and to democratically operate and manage them. With control in the hands of a small minority of greedy and incompetent ciency and low productivity have This has led over a long period to However. thesc reforms have mostly been in vain.
At the end of 1997, a total of 6,599 (39,1%) state-owned were in deticit lhe net deficit was 29.3 billion yuan in 1997, and 55.8 billion yuan in 1998. About 80% of slate-owned enterprises are in debt.
However, If they are all allowed to go bankrupt, the repercussions on bank loans and gencral savings from the people, and on the already problematic levels of unemploy. ment will certainly cause serious problent, of social stability. This is one major reason why the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been Teluciant to pusn tarough suca bankruptcies: Marxism after Auschwitz, by Enzo Traverso £ 11.99, paperback 160pages, Pluto Press THE LATEST of the Notebooks for Study and Research from the IIRE has just been published by Pluto Press Auschwitz was a pre-eminently modern genocide. If racial hatred Was its tist cause, its executor required a rationality' typical of modern capitalism. emest manoel, wring in an afterword to the first edition of Abraham Leon's book The Jewish Question wrote of the slaughter of five million by the Nazis: 'The numan mas madon can nardy conceive concretely the meaning of this number"
At the time, aged 22, Mandel cautioned against seeing the genocide of the jews as a unique crime. points out Traverso. By the time of his later writings Mandel's "point of view had changed and his analysis had become much more nuanced... Parallel to his critique of Eurocentric approaches that isolate Auschwitz from racism and colonial oppression, Mandel rejected the mystical cult of the rolocaust The Jewish genocide must be treated historically; its specificity can only be seen clearly on the basis of a an analytical approach of a comparitive type."
This drawing out of the evolution of Mandel's thought is only one of the many valuable things about this impressive work.
Dialogue
Traverso sustains a dialogue with Whungs on the snoan by many other authors by drawing on the Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalisms pent-up capacity Tor destruc tive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced technology After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan -lated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously 'revised".
The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilisation and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilisation and the destruction of humankind.
For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.
Born in Italy, Enzo Jraverso was a lecturer in Jewish Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en SciHe currently teaches political science at the jules Verne University of Amiens. Two of his carlier books have been published in englisn, une marxists ano the Jewish Question (1994) and The Jews and Germany (1995).
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