Catherine Samary

Catherine Samary^[1] born in 1945, is a French researcher in political economy, specialized on the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. She received her PhD in economics in 1986: her thesis on the contradictory logics of the reforms in the Yugoslav self-management system was published in 1988.^[2]

She was until her retirement a lecturer at the Paris, Dauphine University. She is a regular lecturer at the International Institute for Research and Education, in Amsterdam.^[3]

She wrote in French several books, essays and articles on the Yugoslav experience including Yugoslavia Dismembered.^[4] She developed comparative analysis of the different experiences and reforms of the Soviet planning system.^[5]

Samary put emphasis on specific phases of democratic mass movements in those countries (like in 1968 in Czechoslovakia or later in Poland) compared to their socio-economic transformations through the capitalist restoration after 1989.^[6][7]

She is member of the scientific council of the French Attac and of the editorial board of its Review Les Possibles; founding member of the Association Autogestion (self-management) and of the European Network in solidarity with Ukraine.^[8] She has been involved in its delegations to Ukraine in relation with the left political, trade unionist and feminist networks.^[9]

In 1973 she joined the Fourth International and she is member of its broad international leadership body, the International Committee. She was a co-founder of what was for many years its largest section, the Revolutionary Communist League.

She contributed a chapter of the book (coordinated by Gilbert Achcar, in French and English) about The Legacy of Ernest Mandel.^[10]

She was actively involved in debates over the 2004 French law banning Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in public schools.^[11] She documented three years of conflicts on this issue in an article titled Au-delà du voile et de la laïcité (Beyond the Scarf and Laicity), published on the website Les mots sont importants.^[11] She also published an analysis of French secularism as "not anti-religious".^[12]

She is a regular contributor to the reviews Contretemps, Inprecor, International Viewpoint, VientoSur.

Samary wrote D'un communisme décolonial à la démocratie des communs in the context of the anniversary of October Revolution in 2017, published by Editions Le Croquant in French. The book presents the Yugoslav experience as a break with Stalin's orientation. And it is revisited in the context of the ongoing debates on the commons. Its extended version in English (co-edited with Fred Leplat)  was published under the title Decolonial Communism: Democracy and the Commons. Published by Resistance Books, Merlin Press and the IIRE, 2019.