Economic-union Books

Schneider's excellent "Structure of Strategic Revolution" is perhaps the best one-book lesson on modern military theory I have yet found. He starts with a concise and excellent deconstruction of historical military theory, much in the manner of Svechin himself. Perhaps as like Svechin, Schneider is a teacher of military theory and has applied his classes to his own theoretical work. So for those of you unable to attend the US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies and become, as they call it "a Jedi Knight", then read on.

But the beginning is just to lay a framework for an overview of the Red Army group of military theorists of the 20s and 30s whose story of tragic endings, subsequent rebirth as the basis of American land warfare doctrine (not to mention many others) is only matched by the brilliant insight of their theory. But this book isn't a personal history it is all about military art.

While critiqued above as "dense" I've found Schneider's style relatively easy to read compared to other military theorists. But more importantly than style is the basis of the work and that is a study of the most comprehensive, accurate and effective form of military doctrine yet developed. While in the Soviet experience this lead to the creation of the total warfare state and its subsequent collapse this theory has many utilities for richer and less vulnerable states like America and Australia.

Schneider's conclusion is to examine the effect of the application of best practice military theory to an entire state. In this case Stalin and the Soviet Union. The book isn't really about Stalin the great monster and examines the actual sensible reasons that the Soviet Union felt the necessity to do so. While Schneider explores the ultimate conclusion of this historical chapter with the collapse of the Soviet Union one has to wonder how these ideas (the Red Army group's) are being interpreted in that one remaining total warfare state: North Korea.

Schneider's excellent "Structure of Strategic Revolution" is perhaps the best one-book lesson on military theory I have yet found. He starts with a concise and excellent deconstruction of historical military theory, much in the manner of Svechin himself. Perhaps as like Svechin, Schneider is a teacher of military theory and has applied his classes to his own theoretical work. So for those of you unable to attend the US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies and become, as they call it "a Jedi Knight", then read on.

But the beginning is just to lay a framework for an overview of the Red Army group of military theorists of the 20s and 30s whose story of tragic endings, subsequent rebirth as the basis of American land warfare doctrine (not to mention many others) is only matched by the brilliant insight of their theory. But this book isn't a personal history it is all about military art.

While critiqued above as "dense" I've found Schneider's style relatively easy to read compared to other military theorists. But more importantly than style is the basis of the work and that is a study of the most comprehensive, accurate and effective form of military doctrine yet developed. While in the Soviet experience this lead to the creation of the total warfare state and its subsequent collapse this theory has many utilities for richer and less vulnerable states like America and Australia.

Schneider's conclusion is to examine the effect of the application of best practice military theory to an entire state. In this case Stalin and the Soviet Union. The book isn't really about Stalin the great monster and examines the actual sensible reasons that the Soviet Union felt the necessity to do so. While Schneider explores the ultimate conclusion of this historical chapter with the collapse of the Soviet Union one has to wonder how these ideas (the Red Army groups') are being interpreted in that one remaining total warfare state: North Korea.

Swords Into Market Shares: Technology, Economics, And Security In The New Russia is an invaluable and authoritative examination of the problems Russia is experiencing as it tries to transform from an economic system of centrally controlled economic despotism to one of private enterprise based, technologically impacted system of production, distribution, and consumption. This transformation has resulted in catastrophic and often unintended consequences. Glenn Schweitzer surveys the different visions of prosperity held by Russian entrepreneurs, technologists, and government officials, Russia's economy and its research and development infrastructure, and the impact of the Soviet Legacy that continues to complicate and impede Russian economic and financial recovery. Swords Into Market Shares is highly instructive and recommended reading for students of contemporary Russian society, economic conditions, and international relations.

Swords Into Market Shares: Technology, Economics, And Security In The New Russia is an invaluable and authoritative examination of the problems Russia is experiencing as it tries to transform from an economic system of centrally controlled economic despotism to one of private enterprise based, technologically impacted system of production, distribution, and consumption. This transformation has resulted in catastrophic and often unintended consequences. Glenn Schweitzer surveys the different visions of prosperity held by Russian entrepreneurs, technologists, and government officials, Russia's economy and its research and development infrastructure, and the impact of the Soviet Legacy that continues to complicate and impede Russian economic and financial recovery. Swords Into Market Shares is highly instructive and recommended reading for students of contemporary Russian society, economic conditions, and international relations.

This is a very readable book. With Irons's use of primary sources, Southern workers come to life at a time when they were at their most heroic. It describes the strike of cotton textile workers in four southern states in September 1934, which was part of a general strike of textile workers stretching from New England to Georgia. I've heard this strike called the largest in American history. It describes how hundreds of thousands of poor whites across the south launched a mass movement for economic justice. The author states that this strike has been a very painful episode over the years in the communities in which it affected. The workers were intimidated into submission in the years after the strike. The Wagner Act, according to Irons, did not help them much. Their story seems all too typically American.

Throughout the 1920's, what we today call "downsizing" hit the textile industry full force. The decade saw the emergence of theories on efficiency and "scientific management." Mill owners began pushing aside their pre-capitalist paternalism and started firing workers and increased the workloads of the remaining workers at levels extremely hazardous to physical and mental well-being. In textile mills, the increased workload was called the "stretch-out." These measures increased once the great depression hit and there were many strikes at individual plants which responded by firing strikers, evicting them from their homes in company towns, sending masked men to kidnap union organizers and drive them out of town, etc.etc. Now with Roosevelt in power, there was a major law passed in June 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, (NIRA), section 7a of which stated that workers had the right to organize unions and not suffer employee intimidation for doing so. Southern workers were very optimistic, Irons shows quoting their letters to Roosevelt.

For two years, from June 1933 to May 1935 after the NIRA passed, an attempt was made to organize the country's economy through a bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA was supposed to work with businesses in each industry and draw up a code for each regulating prices, wages, output levels and so on. The aim was to stabilize these industries and eliminate the cutthroat competition which had contributed to causing the Great Depression. Implementation of the textile code was handed over to a committee dominated by textile mill owners. A special NRA committee to analyze the feasibility of reducing or expanding the stretch-out was formed but it was chaired by an industry-friendly industrial engineer. The other members of this committee were an anti-union mill owner and the leader of the printing-pressman's union, George L. Berry. Irons describes how Berry left the running of the board to the other two though occasionally he wrote letters to the leaders of the United Textile Workers (UTW) demanding they do more to reign in the militancy of southern textile mill workers. When the NRA textile mill code went into effect in the summer of 1933 it called for reduced production which gave many mills the impetus to lay off workers and intensify the workload on the remaining members. Minimum wages set by the code were often the maximum wages paid. Firings of union members increased, as did evictions from company housing and physical and sexual abuse by overseers. Many workers started joining locals of the UTW. Complaints were sent to Washington by workers such as relating to the refusal of overseers to open windows in horrendously humid mill work rooms and sexual abuse of female employees. These complaints were almost always rerouted to the special NRA subcommittee on the stretch-out which rarely did anything more than send an investigator who would listen to employer denials and then leave.
The way Irons describes it, the UTW was a big problem for southern textile mill workers. The UTW leadership, as was the leadership of most unions, was anxious to increase its own power by gaining places of influence in the NRA bureaucracy. They wanted to prove their lack of militancy and their devotion to efficiency in business...They were dragged reluctantly into the strike.

Irons shows how southern workers managed to spread the strike wave dramatically with little help from the cash strapped UTW. The strike saw terrible violence. 15 strikers were killed, including the seven by gunfire at Honea Path South Carolina. Irons reconstruct the Honea Path massacre in a way that shows its barbarity, in contrast to previous efforts to minimize it.

The strike ended after a few weeks in September 1934. Mill owners were able to create a climate of fear and insecurity amongst workers. In Georgia, Irons notes, the Democratic governor Eugene Talmadge did not send out the national guard for a while. But after he won the Democratic primary that mid-September and he was thus electorally safe, he declared martial law and imprisoned many striking workers. Some mill owners apparently met with him and gave him a generous campaign contribution just before the election. However the biggest factor ending the strike was FDR using his prestige amongst the poor workers to get them to go back to work. In return for calling off the strike, workers were promised they would not be fired once they returned and a new NRA board was created to hear complaints from textile workers about employer treatment.

Despite Roosevelt's assurances, union members were fired en masse once they returned to work and the climate of fear was maintained in southern textiles. This new NRA textile labor board, Irons shows, made its pro-industry bias clear by its method in conducting its own investigation of the stretch-out. It had received complaints about the use of the stretch-out from 249 of 1200 mills in the south. It decided to investigate 36 of those mills and found 11 of them to have valid worker complaints about the stretch out. Thus with this method it decided that only 6.5 percent of the mills were engaged in excessive workloads.

Janet Irons provides a comprehensive look at a shockingly neglected piece of US labor history: the 1934 general strike of southern textile workers. Irons convincingly shows that the impetus for the strike came from the workers, and that the leadership of the United Textile Workers of America was out of touch and committed to an outdated style of leadership from the top. One of the most fascinating areas Irons explores is the effects of mass communication, new hard-surfaced roads, and inexpensive autos in enabling Southern workers to innovate a new organizing technique: the flying squadron. Teams of strikers in cars and trucks went from mill to mill throughout the Piedmont to spread the walk-out. A minor drawback to the book is its failure to put the textile strike in a broader context. The fall of 1934 saw a general strike in San Francisco and labor unrest in Seattle, Minneapolis and other cities. Arguably, FDR's New Dealers had a lot more than the textile situation on their minds in this period. There is not doubt that Irons's book is an important contribution to an emerging, more nuanced view of southern workers and their alleged passivity.

"In To Form a More Perfect Union, Robert A. McGuire attempts to provide the first solid modern analysis to quantify the impact of the personal economic interests of the Founding Fathers on the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution. Readers familiar with the literature in this area will immediately, and correctly, associate this book with Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, [1913] 1935). In that book, Beard concludes that the delegates' personal interests shaped their behavior with respect to the drafting and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His hypothesis was generally accepted until the 1950s, when most scholars began to question the analysis. An onslaught of counterevidence came during the 1950s and early 1960s, and today most academics believe that Beard's original interpretation was too narrow and that the general political philosophies of the Founding Fathers had greater importance in determining the nature and contents of the U.S. Constitution.

"McGuire essentially resurrects Beard's hypothesis and offers substantial evidence in favor of the view that the Founding Fathers' personal interests had a significant influence on the process of constitutional design and ratification. In light of the substantial body of empirical evidence this book provides, it is likely to bring the personal interest view back into widespread acceptance among academics. Although McGuire draws some of the analysis presented in the book from his previously published journal articles, at least half of what he offers is new and original. What makes the book so compelling is the use of today's significantly better empirical methodology to analyze data, in contrast to the techniques available during the 1950s, when the counterevidence to Beard's hypothesis was presented.

"Readers searching for a middle ground in the debate over whether personal self-interest shaped the U.S. Constitution will find refuge in this book. McGuire repeatedly makes clear that these personal interests were relevant at the margin in the Founding Fathers' decision calculus and that many other factors (such as general political philosophy) influenced these individuals' overall behavior. Among the most compelling findings: (1) personal interests played a bigger role in the specific content of the U.S. Constitution than in the document's overall design; and (2) the framers' debt holdings and slave ownership and the degree of commercialization in their local communities are significantly correlated with their observed behavior and, hence, with the content of the constitution they produced....

"One of the book's strengths is the amount of underlying background data and statistics provided. For example, McGuire includes tables that show not only each individual delegate's vote on an issue (the data used for the dependent variable), but also the predicted probability of a yes vote for that delegate from the estimated logistic regression model. As anyone who has estimated a logistic regression model knows, it is possible for these models to fit well overall but still do a poor job of predicting individual votes. Throughout the book, however, McGuire provides the evidence necessary to comfort readers worried about such potential problems. The book's main weakness is that at times it becomes rather lengthy and dull, but this aspect is simply a cost of being thorough, which is necessary in this case because of the controversial nature of the theory being tested.

"For the great number of readers who are likely to use the results of the book as a single-sentence footnote or reference in their own research, the eleven-page prologue provides all of the background and summary information necessary to make an informed citation of the work. The remaining three hundred or so pages merely fill in the sufficient details to support these conclusions. In that sense, the book reminds me somewhat of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

"Had I been a reviewer for the book prior to its publication, the only suggestion I might have offered to improve it would have been for the author to include a fuller discussion of the debate surrounding the adequacy and structure of the document that preceded the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation.... Had McGuire presented this discussion, he would have provided a fitting framework in which to view the Founding Fathers' choices as marginal institutional changes relative to the existing constitutional order.

"To Form a More Perfect Union undoubtedly will elicit additional research in this highly debated area of constitutional research. Future research will benefit from the 122 pages of raw data and empirical results provided as appendix material. McGuire's book most likely will meet with a better initial acceptance than Beard's book received (it was banned from high school libraries in Seattle and condemned by President Taft and by the president of Beard's own university).

"One important implication of McGuire's book is that the condition of a Rawlsian `veil of ignorance,' putatively necessary to produce a `just' social contract, is not and cannot be satisfied in reality. Any constitution or social contract will be shaped by its designers' individual self-interests. Modern public-choice scholars who favor theories based on the premise of methodological individualism will find comforting reassurance as they read To Form a More Perfect Union."

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Excerpted from a review by Russell S. Sobel in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004.

Colloquially speaking, the main thesis of this book is that the Constitution of the United States was ratified by those who "voted their pocketbook." This has been claimed before in both popular culture and by the historian Charles Beard in his books written in the early years of the twentieth century. What sets this book apart from Beard's work however is that the author attempts, and succeeds to a large degree, to justify his claims with a rigorous statistical study. For those with the appropriate mathematical background and interest in the subject matter will find the book fascinating, even though at times the reader can get lost in the details. Absent for the most part though, and this is refreshing, is excessive moralizing by the author, for such would make the book irritating to some, with a consequent loss in readership.

The main mathematical tool used is logistic regression, which it is fair to say is the most popular tool among economists, even though at times it strains credulity to apply it in some situations that they do. This book could even be used by statistics instructors as a source of more challenging problems in logistic regression. Overall the author is convincing in his use of this tool, and therefore the conclusions of the book are difficult to counter if one accepts logistic regression as being a viable tool. It certainly is in other contexts, such as finance and biological modeling.

If one investigates the economic history of the United States after the war of independence it is not surprising to hear that Americans at the time were fed up with the loose conglomeration of states under the Articles of Confederation. Being financed essentially by paper money by the Continental Congress this currency suffered dramatic depreciation in value as the war dragged on. Some economic historians have estimated that $449 million dollars were issued during this time by the Continental Congress and the states, with none of it bearing interest. Certainly this situation motivated many at the time to seek a hard-money policy, and their attitudes are reflected in their votes for the ratification of the Constitution, as the author shows clearly in this work. To allow the states to issue paper money by fiat would be an anathema to those who lived through it during the war, and its prohibition in the Constitution would thus be a very desirable goal.

The Constitution of the United States is thus a product of the attitudes and interests of those who framed it and voted to adopt it. But their intentions, whether economic or otherwise, are in the final analysis irrelevant since only its social, moral, and legal efficacies are important. If the Constitution is an umbrella of freedom and sound justice for all of its citizens then it does not matter what the intentions of its founders are. If it is not, it should be altered, and it does not matter what the intentions are of those who alter it. The primary value of studying intentions is to shed light on the attitudes of the citizens at the time, and how they reacted to the absence of British rule after the war. No longer a part of the world market system via the British mercantile system, and having a government that could not pay the interest on domestic and foreign debt, they sought out a new alliance, a new government, to ameliorate their dire situation. Their efforts were in retrospect successful, and the government they invented has done a fair job since then.

While trade unions in the United States continue to weaken as the 21st century opens, a relentless offensive by the employers and the government against wages and working conditions is forcing a small but growing layer of workers--from meat packers across the Midwest, to garment workers in a war production plant in Broward County, FL, to miners in the coal fields of Utah--to relearn why trade unions need to be organized where they don't exist, and defended where they do. These workers are learning how a strike can be fought, how to reach out for solidarity and extend it to others, and how a strike can be won. Through involvement in such struggles, they are becoming interested in ideas about how the entire system of exploitation can be changed. They become open to bolder perspectives.

Fighters like these will be hungry for the lessons presented by revolutionary leaders of three generations of the modern working-class movement found in this new edition of Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay from Pathfinder Press.

The book begins with Karl Marx's 1866 document "Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future." The other major piece is "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay," one of the last articles written by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky before he was assassinated in 1940 during his exile in Mexico by orders of Stalin.

Farrell Dobbs, who was a militant leader of the historic 1934 Teamster strikes that built union power in the trucking industry across the Midwest and then became a central leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death in 1983, contributed valuable prefatory material. Along with this, Pathfinder continues its high standard of including an introduction, notes, photo spreads, glossary, and index to make this material highly accessible to contemporary readers.

Hundreds of thousands of workers across China are on strike today, in Utah unorganized coal miners, mostly immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, are forcing the coal bosses to recognize new fighting locals of the UMWA, in a body armor factor in Fort Lauderdale near where I live, friends of mine have been involved with fights to join unions. Where I sit and type now, my union job provides me some kind of health care, but I know the bureaucrats who sit on top of it have nothing in common with the fighting workers of China, Utah, or Fort Lauderdale.

This is one of Trotsky's last works, written in Mexico in 1940s, to analyze the position of unions as reformist governments like Cardenas's PRI in Mexico and Roosevelt's New Deal attempted to involve the union bureaucracies and union structures as reformist obstacles to workers struggles for workers rights, against the war drive that led to WWII, and for Mexico's independent from imperialist countries like Britain and the United States.

Trotsky's analysis here is precise, incisive, and scientific, and more useful today that it was in 1940.

The unions must be transformed from organizations that seek only a few priviledges for their members, to fighting units of the fight of all working people. One examples is health care. The incorporation of the union bureaucrats after WWII, led to their dropping the real fight in the US for quality free public health care for all to negotiating contracts for only their members, and now for fewer and fewer union members.

As the unions backed off from being fighting organizations for all of working people, all of the oppressed, they have become easier for the capitalists to pick off, and weaken, fewer and fewer workers now have unions, and the hold of the self serving bureaucrats who sit atop the unions trying to live the life style of the bosses seems complete.

Yet, unions were built by and large by fighting workers in struggle, often as a result of broader struggles of farmers and oppressed nationalities. My own union in the Miami Transit system was built as a reflection of the civil rights struggle in this city in the 1960s that mobilized bus drivers and non skilled workers

This is the perspective the growing crisis of war and economic crisis that plagues not only the US but the entire capitalist world holds. Struggles to return the trade unions to the fight of all working people, battles with the union bureaucrats to bring the unions to a political movement to replace the government of the bosses with a government of workers and farmers.

While this book is not always available on Amazon, it is always available from BooksfromPathfinder, an Amazon Z store that you can get to by clicking on New and Used further up this page!

It's about time a book is out that provides a view from the wokers themselves. It was refreshing to hear from the "rank-and-file" that unionism is the way American must go if there is going to be a working-class view of America. But most important was the underlying view that the American Labor Movement needs internal democracy if is going to survive in the future. I recommend this book to any union member that has felt alientated by the union leadership. It's time that the leaders think of the memberhsip and not themselves.

Ever since John Sweeney declared that organizing is labor's top priority, numerous books have appeared that describe union strategies in organizing including mobilizing the rank-and-file. But the authors in this book would find that the top-down and staff directed nature of those efforts only minimally overlap with rank-and-file democracy. They feel that actual rank-and-file empowerment within union processes is the only way for the labor movement to regain its former stature. But many questions do arise. None of the authors clearly differentiate between worker democracy within local unions and democracy over workplace affairs. The NLRA restriction to bargaining over wages and conditions has proven to be disastrous to working people. But labor activists and these authors seem to accept this limited role for unions. But that is hiring-hall unionism where jobs may last only a few weeks and larger company strategies are mostly irrelevant. Most working people are firm-located and need to have input to company plans regarding investment, marketing, products, plant closings and locations, etc. If that is company unionism, so be it. Also, the authors point to a nebulous concept of social unionism as a desired path for unions. The fact of the matter is that in the past larger community support for unions was because working people at one time lived in highly localized ethnic, urban communities or small company oriented towns. Many of those communites no longer exist. The authors have confused unions with a political party that is devoted to the social interests of the entire working class. National unions in the U.S. are really very narrowly focused businesses: they collect dues, actively try to increase membership, and provide bargaining and contract administrative services. And are very concerned with survival for their own sake. Since the authors have made rank-and-file democracy their central concern, it is a shortcoming of the book that no comparative analysis of the industrial relations system of a northern European country where workers have legislated co-determination rights was included . The bottom line for this book is that it is well worth reading. It is not a rubber stamp of Sweeney policy. But this book leaves plenty of room for considering what the structure and policies of unions should be for the coming century that will enhance and protect the economic lives of working people.

No dispensable academic tome, THE WAR AT HOME, while providing a monumentally researched analysis of those well-orchestrated government abuses designed and implemented over the last three decades to enlarge and reward corporate America at the expense of labor, the small business man and the American family, also functions as a kind of workbook or primer for change.

Rasmus carefully breaks the book down into separate chronological studies of such issues as Health Care, Free Trade, Tax Shifts and Social Security, methodically walks the reader through a mind field of crippling historical developments characterized by corporate malfeasance and political chicanery, then offers possible approaches and even solutions to the multi-layered. problems.

This is a compelling, richly documented and incite fully constructed work that seeks to both define strategies and to suggest remedy.

I would recommend it highly.

This is an exciting, comphrensive assessment of the political economy of the US during the last 25 years. It shows how power has been developed, and by whom, over this period of time. It explains why we are where we are. Everyone with an interest in American political and economic history should read this book. It really puts everything in one place. It is a heck of an analysis. I highly recommend it to all.

i've just bought the set, but don't wish to keep it for personal reasons. The set is in mint condition, would anyone like to buy it?

i've just bought the set, but don't wish to keep it for personal reasons. The set is in mint condition, would anyone like to buy it?

"...very clear work, each chapter of which is matched with a full bibliography." -European Library, Bulletin Quotidien Europe

This extremely useful book examines Britain's relationship with the European Union. In particular, the author studies the Constitution for Europe, a key part of the EU drive towards a single EU state.

At the `Convention on the Future of Europe', Giscard d'Estaing, the Convention's President, and Sir John Kerr of the Foreign Office presented the supposed drafting body, `The Presidium', with the text of the Constitution. Giscard rejected all the amendments proposed by the other members of the Presidium and refused to take any votes. He then pronounced (wrongly) that the Presidium had unanimously endorsed the Constitution and warned the EU member governments not to upset their achievement.

The Constitution is designed, not to limit the EU's powers, but to allow further extension of these powers without limit and without even the pretence of consultation. Article I-18 says, "If action by the Union should prove necessary ... to attain one the objectives set by the Constitution, and the Constitution has not provided the necessary powers, the Council, acting unanimously on a proposal from the European Commission, and after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament, shall adopt the appropriate measures." So the EU's institutions can assume whatever powers they want, with no need for further treaties, for reference to national parliaments, for referendums or elections.

As French Prime Minister J-P Raffarin wrote of the Constitution, "This pact is the point of no-return. Europe becomes an irreversible project, irrevocable after the ratification of this treaty."

Article III-305-2 of the Constitution would put an end to Britain's role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It says, "Member States which are members of the Security Council will, in the execution of their functions, defend the positions and the interests of the Union ... When the Union has defined a position on a subject which is on the United Nations Security Council agenda, those Member States which sit on the Security Council shall request that the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs be asked to present the Union's position."

Turning to the British economy, Morgan rightly says that industry should be a national responsibility and that Britain should also control its agriculture, food and fisheries. He urges the development of nuclear energy to compensate for the impending reduction in oil output and he points out the "massive scope for invention in the fields of energy efficiency and renewable energy resources."

Morgan points out that in 2002, Britain's total stock of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) was $568 billion (payments to inward investors $17 billion), and of outward FDI $921 billion (earning $52 billion). From 1994 to 2003, the cumulative inflows of FDI totalled $463 billion, and cumulative outflows totalled $878 billion - net outflow $415 billion. This all sounds very impressive, but what is the result? As he notes, the inward investment is not creating new productive capacity but is almost all spent on acquisitions and mergers, which create virtually no jobs. For example, all 2002-03's inward investment created just 34,000 jobs, 0.125% of British employment. Similarly, 90% of Britain's outward investment goes on acquisitions. So all the sloshing back and forth of these huge sums of capital does nothing to expand the real productive economy.

This stress on capital rather than on production has resulted in Britain's disastrous industrial decline. The technology component of the British economy is far too small. In 2000, the World Economic Forum ranked Britain only fifteenth in technological progress and we ranked only eighteenth in the number of patents granted by the US Patent Office per million people.

The EU's aim was always, in Giscard d'Estaing's words, "to create a new political structure based on far-reaching integration and led by institutions of a federal type ... it was to organise the United States of Europe." The author rightly concludes that the EU is `a federal state' and that it is `fundamentally illegitimate'. He also denounces the Blair government for saying that it would "have `them' see things `our way'." Yet he proposes the same policy as Blair: "the UK must change the rules of the game" and "bring the EU back on track."

Since the EU's basic design is federal and supranational, not intergovernmental, it cannot be reformed into being intergovernmental. Each country must retrieve its national sovereignty and democracy.

We should do what we need to do to save Britain, whether the other EU members see things our way or not. In particular, we should continue to demand a referendum on the Constitution, as the next step on Britain's road to withdrawal from the EU.