New Books by Marta Harnecker and Michael A. Lebowitz for Debate on Socialism

3 August 2008 — The Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM), in contribution to the necessary debate on how to build the kind of socialism we want, announces the publication of two important contributions to this debate: El camino al desarrollo humano: ¿capitalismo o socialismo? (The Road to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?) by Michael A. Lebowitz; and El sistema político yugoslavo: buscando un camino alternativo al sistema representativo burgués y al sistema estatista soviético (The Yugoslav Political System: Searching for an Alternate Path to the Bourgeois Representative System and the Soviet Statist System), a selection of texts by Marta Harnecker.

The launch of the books will take place on Tuesday, 5 August, at 5 PM, on the CIM premises.  The event will include the presentation of the books by Ángel Navas, president of the Federación de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica, and Julio Chávez, mayor of Torres Municipality in Lara State.

The book El sistema político yugoslavo, a selection of texts by Marta Harnecker, a leading researcher who has disseminated the experiences of transformation of our continent, will make important contributions to the debate on how to build a truly participatory democratic political system that allows organized society to exercise power — a key debate for the creation of a political system in accordance with the needs of the socialist model of democracy for the twenty-first century.

Among other texts, the book includes “El sistema político autogestionario socialista” (The Political System of Socialist Self-Management) by Edvard Kardelj, a leading theoretician of the Yugoslav model of socialist self-management; “El Sistema de Delegados” (The System of Delegates), a book written by Miodrag Zecevic in 1977, which explains in detail the functioning and state of development of the delegate system in Yugoslavia; and an article by Marta Harnecker, “Notes for a Debate on Constituent Power and  Constituted Power.”

Also presented will be El camino al desarrollo humano: ¿capitalismo o socialismo? by Michael A. Lebowitz, professor emeritus of socialism and Marxist economics at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class.  The book was written to help explain the aspects that must be taken into account in choosing between capitalism and socialism in Venezuela and elsewhere in the world.

As explained on the backcover of the book:

“What do we all want?  We want to be all we can be.  And not just us.  We also want our family and loved ones to be able to develop their full potential, we want all of us to receive what is necessary for our development.  Each according to their need for self-development.

“If we believe in people, if we believe that the goal of human society should be to ‘ensure full human development,’ our choice is clear: socialism or barbarism.”

Both Harnecker and Lebowitz are collaborators at the Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda, the sponsor of the launch of these two important contributions to the debate on socialism of the 21st century.  The Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda is located in the penthouse of Anauco Suites at the Central Park, towards the end of Bolivar Avenue, Caracas.


The original press release in Spanish was published on Aporrea.org on 3 August 2008.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).



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