The most famous statement Marx made on teleology was ostensibly against it. In addressing Lassalle on the importance of Darwin, he noted [read more]

Modern monetary theory (MMT) has become the flavour of the time in many leftist circles in recent years. The left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is apparently a supporter; Bernie Sanders’ former economic adviser Stephanie Kelton is a leading exponent and populariser of… [read more]

How should you be? You should be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds. It stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, “How unlucky that this should happen to me.” But not at all. Perhaps say instead… [read more]

We already know, and it is a waste of air to keep pointing out, that everything coming out of the mouths of the venture capital freaks of the Silicon Valley and the LinkedIn influencers is a nightmarish sludge of inane nonsense. It’s a mix of blind tech enthusiasm (“This tech… [read more]

I believe that today, in this occasion, celebrating an act of such revolutionary significance as this one, in which the Ministry of Industries exhibits sincere pride at having always been at the forefront of deepening of revolutionary consciousness through collective work of a… [read more]

The relationship of Hitler’s fascists to Hegel’s philosophy is basically very simple: they resolutely reject it. Alfred Rosenberg, the main Nazi theorist, sees in the connection between Hegel and Marx an essential reason to define the Hegelian philosophy as hostile to the… [read more]

The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticize, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party. [read more]

Is it possible for a movement to sustain itself without having a notion of its end goal? Bernstein’s principle, that “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing,” though it claims to be an “orthodox” interpretation of dialectics, belies a purely mechanistic conception… [read more]

Gadamer accepts that Hegel acknowledges a connection between thought and language. But he believes that for Hegel language is nothing more than “a self-effacing and temporary medium of thought or merely its casing.” For Gadamer himself, by contrast, language is the permanent… [read more]

From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves… [read more]

There is this weird cult I’ve encountered quite a few times now, of people who associate themselves with a politician named Lyndon LaRouche. Many media outlets describe them as “far-right,” but LaRouchites, as I will call them, themselves decry this label, insisting they are not… [read more]

The so-called “green” peasant rebellions against the Bolsheviks immediately after the revolution in Russia are of some contemporary interest not only within Soviet studies, but also for students of rural revolt in the Third World. This is the case both because the green movements… [read more]

Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from the social nature of man and apart from his historical development, and was therefore incapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence of knowledge on… [read more]

Of course, illusions and false ideas must be criticised and rejected as false and illusory. But one understands very little of religion and dreams if all that one knows of them is that they are false. The realist theories of knowledge that I have been criticising go no further than this. The dialectical materialist theory, however, seeks to understand these false ideas as reflections of reality. [read more]

I am very pleased to find you so resolute, and to see your thoughts turning away from the past and towards a new enterprise. To Paris, then! That ancient bastion of philosophy — absit omen! [May this be no ill omen!] — and the modern capital of the modern world. Whatever… [read more]

To judge the whole philosophical past as madness and folly is not only an anti-historical error, since it contains the anachronistic presumption that in the past they should have thought like today, but it is a truly genuine holdover from metaphysics, since it supposes a dogmatic… [read more]

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. [read more]

I am writing this to say my last goodbye to you. I write this as one who lives in this world, but by the time you read this, I would have become a shade in the underworld. Ink and tears flow in equal measure as I write. Time and again I have had to put my pen away, unable to… [read more]

My name is Esperanza and I am a socialist, a feminist, a transgender Latina woman, and a survivor of the sex trade. I am writing to you as comrades in the struggle for socialism and as sisters who have presumably shared the experience of being prostitutes. I prefer the term… [read more]

The Melians are a colony from Sparta. They had refused to join the Athenian empire like the other islanders, and at first had remained neutral without helping either side; but afterwards, when the Athenians had brought force to bear on them by laying waste their land, they had… [read more]

The first version of this article was written after the first three months of being back in China after too long away. The version written then contained many immediate impressions and experiences, which I interpreted on the basis of extensive earlier research. There is an… [read more]

What is the significance of the life and teaching of Mahatma Gandhi? Is the story of his life “the story of his experiments with truth,” as he himself put it in the 1920s when he started writing his autobiography? [read more]

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or to attacks upon his honor and reputation.” And further, “Everyone has the right to the protection of the… [read more]

In 1867 there appeared in Hamburg Capital, a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I, Marx’s chief work, which expounds the foundations of his economic socialist conceptions and the main features of his criticism of existing society, the capitalist mode of… [read more]

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from… [read more]

The Trotsky-Stalin struggle is not one between two different personalities. It’s a struggle between two different principles of legitimizing power. [read more]

Gramsci distinguishes between, on the one hand, a dogmatic communism and, on the other, a “critical communism” that presents itself as heir of the highest summits of the bourgeois cultural tradition, parting from Hegel and classical German philosophy. [read more]

Over the weekend of November 30th, more than twenty revolutionary organizations from across the United States came together in Colorado Springs to unite under the banner of the Marxist Center. This put a new layer of formality onto what has been until now an informal, if still… [read more]

“Workers must seize the means of production!” Yes. But what does this mean in practice? [read more]

Why was Rakhmetov was introduced, if now he’s gone and will no longer appear in my story? Was it really necessary to introduce a special character so that he could express his opinion of the others? [read more]

What is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of the… [read more]

This article seeks to articulate an interpretation of Fanon’s engagement with G. W. F. Hegel that does not either assume that Fanon rejects Hegel’s normative conclusions or that Fanon’s engagement is incidental to his larger philosophical projects. I argue that Fanon’s take on… [read more]

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this… [read more]

What can be more comical than fighting “kulaks, usurers, parasites and sharks” by perfecting the “rules” of credit banks? Usury in its worst forms is most tenacious in our rural districts, and is so precisely because of the exclusiveness of the estate system there… [read more]

The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value, by making the worker work longer than is necessary in order… [read more]

In the decade after the war Freud’s theories dominated the narrow circles of British intellectuals. His psychoanalysis was accepted warmly for many reasons. It was new and exciting, it was shocking, it debunked religion and morals, it promised an internal liberation from all… [read more]

My effort to address the comments made by the two distinguished scholars (to “negate their negations” as it were), consists of three steps. I will start with a brief resume of Hegel’s dialectical logic, to provide a scaffold for the debate. Subsequently, I will address the… [read more]

If Engels had not been the constant companion in arms of Marx in the revolutionary struggles of the 19th century, there is no doubt that he would be remembered chiefly as one of the foremost scientist-philosophers of the century. It was an ironical tribute paid to the correctness… [read more]

For nearly 30 years, George Meany, a New York Irish Catholic plumber, who rose to be the undisputed leader of the American labor movement, collaborated with Jay Lovestone, a Lithuanian-born Jew, who was secretary general of the American Communist Party from 1927 to 1929, until he… [read more]

Before the Fourth Congress the bourgeois formula “race question” found general acceptance in the Party as a definition of the Negro question in the United States. The fact that no one questioned the correctness of this formula was itself indicative of the passivity and general… [read more]

Nietzsche’s left-wing advocates often brush away any criticism of the philosopher’s judeophobic and pro-eugenics views with the explanation that his work was corrupted by his sister. The charge goes something like this: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a fascist-sympathizer who… [read more]

Deputy Surkov’s speech in the Duma during the debate on the Synod estimates, and the discussion that arose within our Duma group when it considered the draft of this speech (both printed in this issue) have raised a question which is of extreme importance and urgency at this… [read more]

Professor David Harvey (DH), the human geographer, is probably the most eminent Marxist scholar alive today with a host of books, papers and educational videos to his name on Marxist economic theory. In April 2018, he circulated a short paper expressing succinctly his view of… [read more]

It’s 200 years today since Karl Marx was born. And it’s just over 100 years since the great 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about Marx’s contribution. Keynes wrote then: “how can I accept the (Communist) doctrine which sets up as its bible above and beyond… [read more]

At the “World Conference against Racism” in Durban, South Africa, three thousand non-governmental organizations from all over the world fiercely condemned Israel for its national oppression and racial discrimination of Palestinians — its brutal military repression did not fall… [read more]

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. [read more]

The problem of recognition in transitional states is the difficulty of assigning to a definite set an object that possesses some of the features of two mutually exclusive ones, and the harms attendant on failing to do so. Socialism is not capitalism; hence capitalist traits are… [read more]

This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the “man”-made boundaries of gender. [read more]

Was Lenin, as the standard interpretations would have it, a sectarian who sought to destroy all who disagreed with him? Or did he also display ecumenist tendencies alongside, or in tension with, his sectarian bent? Is there perhaps a deeper relation between sectarianism and… [read more]

Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social class or does every social class have its own specialized category of intellectuals? The problem is complex because of the various forms taken by the real historical process of the formation of different categories of… [read more]

Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research examining the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six misconceptions about misinformation… [read more]

History shows that if at different times men were imbued with different ideas and desires, the reason for this is that at different times men fought nature in different ways to satisfy their needs and, accordingly, their economic relations assumed different forms. [read more]

Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. It is impossible to emphasize this thought too much at a time when along with the fashionable preaching of opportunism people are carried away with the narrowest possible forms of practical activity. [read more]

I have few personal recollections of Georgii Valentinovich. Our meetings were infrequent, although they were not devoid of significance, and I gladly record my memories of him. [read more]

Let’s discuss Nietzsche’s explicit hatred of the syllogism and its enduring relevance to reactionary politics more generally. According to him, “the knife-thrust of the syllogism” is how “Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics,” how “the rabble gets on top.” “That… [read more]

Your “theory” is certainly much loftier than that of Mao Zedong; yours is high in the sky, while his is down-to-earth. But admirable as is such loftiness, it will unfortunately be just the thing welcomed by the Japanese aggressors. Hence I fear that it will drop down from the sky, and when it does it may land on the filthiest place on earth. [read more]

Will you believe in the gods or in the Peasant Association? [read more]

The dialectical moment is when definite concepts supersede themselves and transition into their opposites. But, especially in philosophy, if the dialectical principle is applied outside of the context of complete understanding, it becomes skepticism, and the… [read more]

Materialists have been criticising Kant from a standpoint diametrically opposite to that from which Mach and Avenarius criticise him. [read more]

All possible brands of Kantianism form the main bulwark in the struggle against materialism; it is the philosophical spiritual weapon employed by bourgeois reaction in the ideological sphere. In the field of social science, Kantianism is utilised for this purpose as a dualist… [read more]

The extraordinary wealth and density of historical, philosophical, and political trees that thicken the 1000 pages of Domenico Losurdo’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel (hereafter Nietzsche) make the task of any reviewer of the book extremely difficult. [read more]

Sixty years ago, on November 14, 1831, died a man who will indisputably and always occupy one of the very first places in the history of thought. Not one of the sciences which the French call “sciences morales et politiques” has remained unaffected by the powerful and… [read more]

Our Party has established the theoretical school for cadres to raise the level of their understanding in order to meet the requirements of its revolutionary tasks. [read more]

In Italy, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, situating himself within the tradition started by Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti developed an indictment against Hegel, and specifically against those elements of Hegelian philosophy that were, deliberately or not, embedded within… [read more]

Answerer was built to last as long as was necessary — which was quite long, as some races judge time, and not long at all, according to others. But to Answerer, it was just long enough. [read more]

In the first few weeks of 2024, amid intensifying news of world war and a flare-up of the global pandemic, I made the strange decision to focus on readying for publication three short fiction stories. On some level this is just because of my mood. However, I also chose the three… [read more]

It can be difficult to foresee the twists and turns through which fortune brings ruin and ruin brings fortune. There once was a man, skilled in divination, who lived close to the Northern frontier with his son. One day for no reason, the son’s horse ran away to the nomads across… [read more]

The kings of steel, of petroleum, and all the other kings of the United States have always in a high degree excited my power of imagination. It seemed to me certain that these people who possess so much money could not be like other mortals. [read more]

The history of the Communist movement is full of intrigue, espionage, and infiltration. One of my go-to examples is from the United States, where in the 1960s an already-weak movement was divided and browbeaten by FBI agents pretending to be ultra-principled, far-left agitators: [read more]

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. [read more]

Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race… [read more]

The transformation problem has provoked controversy within Marxism and derision from without for more than a century. Bourgeois economists in particular (beginning with Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, and continuing, most notoriously, with Paul Samuelson) have seized on it to argue for… [read more]

As of March 2018 Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist who typically covers El Chapo and ISIS, can add to his list of accolades a nomination for a James Beard award, given for excellence in culinary writing. What’s a writer who used to work for the Department of Defense doing… [read more]

Religion is a historical phenomenon pertaining to a definite period in the development of human society. It has its own cycle of emergence, development, and demise. Religious faith and religious sentiment, along with religious ceremonies and organizations consonant with this… [read more]

The comrade who first introduced me to Ilyich told me that he was a man of scientific bent, that he read scientific books exclusively, that he had never read a novel and never read poetry. This surprised me. I myself in my youth had read all the classics; I knew practically the… [read more]

The widespread prejudice that philosophy is something very difficult because it is the intellectual activity of a specific category of specialist scholars or professional and systematic philosophers must be destroyed. To do this we must first show that all men are “philosophers,”… [read more]

“If the capitalist is the owner of the capital on which he operates, he pockets the whole surplus-value. It is absolutely immaterial to the labourer whether the capitalist does this, or whether he has to pay a part of it to a third person as its legal proprietor.” [read more]

The training schedule was exacting, but occasionally left us time for a little fun. We were “entertaining” a group of foreign students and trying to lead a Bedouin kind of life in order to politicise our Bedouin population. The students had been attending an international… [read more]

Interviewer: Over lunch you said that around the time of Para and afterward with The Battle of Algiers you felt that colonialism was a most urgent theme. What in particular made you feel that way? [read more]

The myth to be discussed here was given its purest expression by John Plamenatz when he asserted that “Marx often called ideology ‘false consciousness’.” Not surprisingly, Plamenatz cites no instances of this usage, as, in truth, Marx never calls ideology “false consciousness.”… [read more]

Lenin very rarely mentioned Africa in his writings on colonialism, but inferences about Africa can be drawn from Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and other works. Most bourgeois writers on the partition of Africa make snide remarks on the Leninist explanation… [read more]

If we consider how freedom comes into being, this is nothing other than the phenomenon of history. Although freedom as such is primarily an abstraction, the means by which it comes into being are concrete, and present themselves before our eyes in the form of history. [read more]

No one can remain calm in the face of imperialist bombs and lies. [read more]

Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa. [read more]

“Gaddafi’s death is a historic turning point!” proclaim the chorus of leaders of NATO and the West, who do not even take the trouble to put distance between themselves and the barbaric assassination of the Libyan leader or the lies deployed to that end by the leaders of the… [read more]

Some people understand being in favour of something as a kind of thought act: it happens in one fell swoop in the realm of intentions, and it can be verified by a simple declaration of support. It is enough for me to declare I’m in favour of, for example, abolishing the… [read more]

What makes this book special? [read more]

One problem continues to afflict every socialist who feels in themselves the historical responsibility that falls upon the working class and upon the Party whose mission is to represent the critical and functional consciousness of this class. [read more]

Michael Hudson argues that the industrial capitalism of a previous era has given way to a new form of financial capitalism. Today’s financial capitalists, unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, now claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents… [read more]

One cannot overstate the wisdom of that phrase attributed to Georges Clemenceau: War is too serious a business to be left to the generals! Even in his acute chauvinism and anticommunism, the French prime minister maintained a fairly lucid awareness of the fact that specialists… [read more]

There’s a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase. [read more]

You ask me, my young comrade, what role does proletarian ideology give to “love”? Perhaps you are concerned that labour youth are presently “more preoccupied with love and all sorts of related questions” than with the larger tasks facing the workers’ state. If so (it is difficult… [read more]

“Dogmatism,” “doctrinairism,” “ossification of the party — the inevitable retribution that follows the violent strait-lacing of thought” — these are the enemies against which the knightly champions of “freedom of criticism” in Rabocheye Dyelo rise up in arms. We are very… [read more]

The root evil in the United States is slavery. The party seeking the abolition of chattel slavery has its stronghold in the states of New England. These states demand protective tariffs. It may very well be that they are mistaken about this, that they don’t in fact need… [read more]

The term Romanticism designates a complex synthesis of literary and general cultural movements that developed from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th. Though it tends to be more associated with either end of these movements, it refers to very diverse phenomena. [read more]

One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. [read more]

The October Socialist Revolution presented the toilers — workers and peasants — with extremely vast opportunities to rebuild their life. The worker felt he was the master of his enterprise: the peasant received land and saw his cherished dream come true. All that awakened them to… [read more]

1. If self-education is to be successful, it is necessary to develop a number of habits: to read to oneself; to not read too slowly; to know how to use books, newspapers, manuals and library catalogues; to know what to extract and how to write down notes. In… [read more]

It was for Yuny Communist in 1919 that I wrote my first article on self-education. It pointed out correctly that it was not “by sitting in an office, but by participating in collective activity that one could best educate oneself.” That is true. But then, the article was… [read more]

I send my warmest greetings to the Soviet Republics of the Caucasus, and should like to express the hope that their close alliance will serve as a model of national peace, unprecedented under the bourgeoisie and impossible under the capitalist system. [read more]

The question of the tax in kind is at present attracting very great attention and is giving rise to much discussion and argument. This is quite natural, because in present conditions it is indeed one of the principal questions of policy. [read more]

It is a strange thing: every Communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it ruins every living endeavor, that it distorts all measures, all decrees, all orders; but when a Communist begins to work in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he… [read more]

Is it possible to understand the emergence of Nazism while looking only at Germany? References from two very different authors will help us to tackle this problem. A particularly useful quote is the excellent motto from Tocqueville: “whoever has seen and investigated France alone… [read more]

This has now been the motto of the English working-class movement for the last fifty years. It did good service in the time of the rising Trades Unions after the repeal of the infamous Combination Laws in 1824 ; it did still better service in the time of the glorious Chartist… [read more]

The author of the article “Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr. Zhukovsky” is obviously an intelligent man and, had he found a single passage in my account of “primitive accumulation” to support his conclusions, he would have quoted it. For want of such a passage he considers it… [read more]

This is Engels’s afterword to the 1894 reprint of his book On Social Relations in Russia (1875). In it, he addresses a polemic in which Marx is very implicated, regarding the applicability of his theories to the Russian situation. I discovered it through Anatoly… [read more]

Why can’t capitalists treat workers better? Why do we get paid so much less than the value of what we produce with our labour? That capitalism exploits workers is obvious to anyone who has worked for wages, and Marx was not the first person to point it out. Utopian socialists… [read more]

Italian scholar Domenico Losurdo puts forth an original hypothesis regarding G. W. F. Hegel’s political philosophy: That Hegel’s politics were intrinsically democratic, populist, and strikingly radical for his time, and perhaps even compared to the mainstream politics which… [read more]

The “majority” and “minority” first came into being at the Second Party Congress (1903). That was the congress at which our scattered forces were to have united in one powerful party. We Party workers placed great hopes in that congress. “At last!” — we exclaimed joyfully — “we… [read more]

In Bordiga’s long article only one thing is truly noteworthy: the elegant skepticism through which he avoids taking a clear position about points which he nevertheless claims to dissent from. For all there is continual oscillation between thesis and antithesis, he fails to… [read more]

What we need here now is Iskra (although it has no sparks, we need it: at all events it contains news, the devil take it, and we must thoroughly know the enemy), beginning with No. 63. We very much need Bonch-Bruyevich’s publications: The Fight for the Congress, To… [read more]

Commodity fetishism is the observation that through many small separate acts of market exchange we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. It’s a key concept in Marx’s critique of… [read more]

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to go about defining socialism. One is more rationalist, exegetical — it begins with Marx’s description of capitalism and negates whatever it takes to be its core components. The other way is more empirical, historical — it takes Really… [read more]

The Soviet government is inviting foreign capitalists to obtain concessions in Russia. [read more]

I am talking with you as an elder like you. A saying runs that “talents are exhausted with the coming of old age,” and our elders generally believe it. Whatever happens, they say, “old people must live in quietness, we are old, we have no more ambition. It is up to our children… [read more]

The unofficial economist of Italian nationalism, Professor Alfredo Rocco, is convinced that he has demolished the collectivist program of socialism once and for all with this formidable objection: Italian wealth amounts to somewhere between 80 billion and 100 billion lire; wage… [read more]

Events are the real dialectic of history. They transcend all reasoning, all personal judgements, all simple and irresponsible wishful thinking. Events, with the unbreakable logic of their development, teach the working and peasant masses, who are conscious of their destiny, these… [read more]

Italian anarchists are very irritable because they are very conceited. Their longstanding conviction that they’re oracles of revealed revolutionary truth has become “monstrous” ever since the Socialist Party, through the influence of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik… [read more]

In the conclusion to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx summarizes his judgment of Hegel as follows: “The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness… [read more]

In this brief presentation, I will try to explain the content of my book, Liberalism: A Counter-History. This book aims to answer a key question: what is liberalism? This question may sound superfluous and provocative at the same time. Everybody knows that liberalism is… [read more]

Is there any connection between imperialism and the monstrous and disgusting victory opportunism (in the form of social-chauvinism) has gained over the labour movement in Europe? This is the fundamental question of modern socialism. [read more]

In 1956 Premier Zhou forcefully stated: “Solely relying on the power of one department we cannot produce a computer, but under the leadership of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, centralizing the entire country’s strength, could it not be done?” On May 20th of… [read more]

One of the most widely misused terms on the Net is “ad hominem.” It is most often introduced into a discussion by certain delicate types, delicate of personality and mind, whenever their opponents resort to a bit of sarcasm. As soon as the suspicion of an insult appears, they… [read more]

Already in 1951, when Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was first published, the concept of totalitarianism had been debated for decades. And yet, the meaning of the term still lacks a proper definition. Is it possible to find a way through what appears to… [read more]

Yesterday I received a letter in which you demand from me a detailed judgment of Proudhon. Lack of time prevents me from fulfilling your desire. Added to which I have none of his works to hand. However, in order to assure you of my good will I will quickly jot down a… [read more]

We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon. [read more]

Our country has entered a new period, a period of socialist modernization. Alongside the expansion of our productive forces, we should also reform and improve our socialist economic and political structures, build a highly-developed socialist democracy, and perfect the socialist… [read more]

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was accompanied by a curious ideological phenomenon: the attempt to silence the large and unprecedented protest movement by accusing it of anti-Americanism. With still new wars on the horizon, this supposed anti-Americanism was and continues to be… [read more]

A great deal has been written lately about the potential decline of the U.S. dollar’s dominance in international trade and the rise of alternative trade mechanisms involving other currencies such as the yuan. To better contextualize these events, it’s useful to revisit some major… [read more]

In order to avoid any arbitrary simplification, it is essential to keep in mind the fact that, during the twentieth century, the most diverse critiques of modernity flourish both in Germany and elsewhere. While underscoring the complexity of this historical framework, however… [read more]

A reader sent us an e-mail asking for theory-writing tips, and they liked my reply, so I’m sharing a slightly edited version of it in case it is of use to others. [read more]

It is not necessary to dwell upon the characteristics of our revolution; upon its original form, with its dashes of spontaneity which marked the transition from a revolution of national liberation to a socialist revolution; one full of rapidly passing stages, led by the same… [read more]

How can communists ensure that the daily struggle of the masses towards their immediate demands grows into a revolutionary force, especially in this period of thoroughgoing bourgeois triumphalism? This is a central issue for Portuguese communists, scarred as they are by… [read more]

In Lenin the critique of colonialism and imperialism plays a central role, far beyond the immediacy of politics. What is democracy? Let us see how the classics of the liberal tradition define it. [read more]

Before the U.S. had a Constitution, but after winning its independence from Great Britain, there were eight years during which the thirteen colonies that comprised it were organized under the Articles of Confederation. This was a boon to states’ rights, as the Articles entailed a… [read more]

Why do these people love themselves so much? I don’t get it. [read more]

It has been frequently noted that IQ examinations, while professing to measure innate intelligence, are riddled with racial, gender, and class biases. Thus a low-income, inner-city youth, confronting a seemingly innocuous phrase like “behind the sofa” on an IQ test, may find it… [read more]

Is it possible for a single mind to fully fathom the transition from capitalism to communism? I can, without too much trouble, imagine a group of about twenty people doing something like communism, but if the size of the group grows much beyond that, I’m at a loss. What’s more… [read more]

Throughout history we observe that people use political language in the way accorded to them by tradition, even when that political language — that conceptual language — no longer corresponds to reality. I think this is happening today among Communists and Marxists in Brazil. [read more]

In German Cold War anti-communist discourses, the image of the Red Army as a “horde of rapists” worked as a strategy of exclusion in the construction of a national identity based on “Western values.” This paper analyzes the ideological dimension of the stereotypes of raped women… [read more]

What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our Theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations. We emphasise this difference — in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy. It is especially important for the proletariat and… [read more]

Everyone is anti-capitalist now! Good. Questions remain, though: What exactly is capitalism? And what are communists planning to do about it? [read more]

Since Sorel, it has become a cliché to refer to the primitive Christian communities in assessing the modern proletarian movement. It must be said at once that Sorel is in no way responsible for the small-mindedness and intellectual crudity of his Italian admirers, just as Karl… [read more]

The old Lie: “Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” [read more]

There is much talk these days about World War 3. This anxiety is a very well-justified reaction to loud saber-rattling. However, fear runs the risk of becoming nihilistic resignation. The uncritical adoption of an incorrect theory of social behaviour, even in protest… [read more]

The evaluation of Stalin’s merits and demerits would at first seem to be a matter of measuring a historical figure, a question with a definitive conclusion, but in reality it is deeply linked to a series of ongoing issues in today’s struggle. In the final analysis, it’s a… [read more]

The tsar was told by his most important general that there was a certain person, “of unknown rank, without a passport, who goes by the name of Lenin.” This Lenin threatened to take away the tsar’s soldiers with one word and to grind the generals, commanders, and officers — even… [read more]

Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general. [read more]

There is no doubt about it: the guiding thread of Nietzsche’s thought is the condemnation of revolution at the political, philosophical, and epistemological level. [read more]

Marxism, though wide-ranging and profound, can be summed up in a sentence: the pursuit of the emancipation of humankind. [read more]

Chernyshevsky’s ideas are important to the person who is certain of victory, important to us because we are building socialism, and building it consciously, because we have real power, even if limited, over events. [read more]

That part of philosophy which deals with questions of man, just like the other part which deals with questions of external nature, is based on the natural sciences. The principle underlying the philosophical view of human life and all its phenomena is the idea, worked out by the… [read more]

The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote: [read more]

Some time ago the members of the Political Bureau of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.) received a letter from Comrade Yaroshenko, dated March 20, 1952, on a number of economic questions which were debated at the November discussion. The author of the letter complains that the basic… [read more]

Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearance by force only. The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently… [read more]

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment. [read more]

Since the time of Rousseau, the objective socio-political meaning of the return to the natural state has changed significantly: if before it consisted of an element in opposition to the existing order (one is reminded of the famous beginning of the Social Contract: “Man… [read more]

Gene Sharp is popularly understood to be a kind of social movement hero. He is this intellectual giant that specifically wrote, prolifically, on the question of non-violent actions; the question of how non-violent tactics and strategy are sort of uniquely equipped — moreso than… [read more]

The Doctor was found in his library, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He must be over seventy years of age. His physique is well knit, massive, erect. He has the head of a man of intellect, and the features of a cultivated Jew. His hair and beard are long… [read more]

There is in ethnology an aspect of the sexual division of labor which up to the present time has neither been studied globally nor considered in an appropriate fashion: that of the tools which men and women use. The question is to know if there exists a sexual differentiation in… [read more]

There’s a very common cliche in rhetorical political argumentation that goes something like this: “I am concerned about the quality (or style, or approach) of your argument. Not for my own personal sake — no, I’m actually very ambivalent (on your side, even!). I’m raising my… [read more]

What will determine the future of philosophy? More than anything else, it is the success of the struggles of the working class. Marxist philosophy, in turn, is essential for guiding those struggles. [read more]

Every young person who truly cares about rock and roll will at some point stumble on Robert Christgau’s music reviews and get indignant about them. Christgau is the most established pop music critic in America, one of the original guys who started way back when being a rock… [read more]

During the past few years strong movements have developed among women and among homosexuals seeking their liberation. There has been some uncertainty about how to relate to these movements. [read more]

What is fundamentalism? One immediately thinks about the Middle East and Islam, but the term first appeared in U.S. Protestant circles, regarding a movement that developed prior to World War I whose followers occasionally referred to themselves as “fundamentalists.” Although this… [read more]

The names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, despite all that separates them in other respects, are often mentioned together in relation to a joint atheism, antimetaphysical materialism, and caustic denunciation of religion. Here, it is argued, the ideas of the two mighty… [read more]

A critical examination is made of political psychology, specifically psychoanalytic and “depth” psychology as applied to the study of politics. I argue that psychological explanations for political leaders and movements (a) tend to be reductionist and based on interpretations… [read more]

A while back I explained why I was very skeptical of “Crypto” hype on a Marxist basis. I want to try something similar against “Artificial Intelligence” hype. [read more]

The world-famous British chemist, William Ramsay, has discovered a method of obtaining gas directly from a coal seam. Ramsay is already negotiating with a colliery owner on the practical application of this method. A great modern technical problem is thus approaching solution. [read more]

The classical school of political economy, including Ricardo, saw profits as a residual net income, once wages had been paid. Indeed, so strict was their adherence to this concept that Ricardo believed that only increases or decreases in production costs in the wage-good… [read more]

Before joining the neo-liberal order, India used to have “rupee payment arrangements” with the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries under which the main international reserve currency, the US dollar, was used neither for settling transactions nor even as the unit… [read more]

All in that city was strange, incomprehensible. Churches in great number pointed their many tinted steeples toward the sky, in gleaming colours; but the walls and the chimneys of the factories rose still higher, and the temples were crushed between the massive façades of… [read more]

I think that President Obama’s attempt to destabilize Russia will be seen by history as disastrous as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like the Iraq war, the de facto declaration of “war by other means” against Russia will accelerate the very dynamic that it… [read more]

Karl Marx writes in The German Ideology: “The division of labor […] manifests itself also in the ruling class […] so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class […] its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the illusions of… [read more]

Capitalism sucks for workers. It’s common to see the obvious failures of our current system as new horrors, and to conclude that we need to return to some time when things were better. Maybe the “better time” is vague — just a general hand-waving and an exhortation to make things… [read more]

Human motives are impossible to observe in any direct empirical way. We can view behavior and listen to utterances but we cannot observe the actual intent that is attributed to such things. People may profess all sorts of intentions, but they are also capable of outrageous… [read more]

Lately we have been hearing a great deal about “blowback.” But the real menace we face today is global rollback. The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public… [read more]

We live at a time when resistance to the inequities that exist in this world and the struggle for a better world are almost totally detached from any striving for socialism. Climate change, imperialist aggression, forcible dispossession of peasants in the name of “development”… [read more]

The Information Bulletin of the Technical Commission Abroad (No. 1, August 11, 1911) and the message To All Members of the R.S.D.L.P., signed by “A Group of Pro-Party Bolsheviks,” which appeared almost simultaneously in Paris, are attacks identical in substance… [read more]

In the era from the confrontation with colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s through the process of decolonization, African scholars have resolved a number of issues. First, African history and society became a legitimate field of inquiry. Second, they have emphasized the need to… [read more]

Since 2009, alternating Liberal and Conservative administrations in Canada have been united in their efforts to try to make a national tradition out of “Black Ribbon Day.” This August 23rd “remembrance” attempts to draw an equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust and “the crimes of… [read more]

Robert Penn Warren was a white liberal American, a “man of letters,” and he interviewed Malcolm X in 1964. [read more]

The time has come for the people of Württemberg to cease to vacillate between hope and fear, to end their cycle of expectancy and frustrated expectations. This time has not come for those who, whether caught up in the upheaval or deliberately setting out to preserve the old, look… [read more]

Marx, at the height of fury, slammed his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp on the table reverberated and tottered, and jumping up from his place, said at the same time: “Ignorance has never yet helped anybody.” [read more]

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies. A… [read more]

I should like to tell you something about the situation in our country, ‘Portuguese’ Guinea, beginning with an analysis of the social situation, which has served as the basis for our struggle for national liberation. I shall make a distinction between the rural areas and the… [read more]

The mainland will maintain the socialist system and not turn off onto the wrong road, the road to capitalism. One of the features distinguishing socialism from capitalism is that socialism means common prosperity, not polarization of income. The wealth created belongs first to… [read more]

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) has been considered by many to be one of the titans of twentieth century philosophy. His international reputation was assured with the publication in 1927 of Being and Time, a book that was characterized by the young Jürgen Habermas as “the… [read more]

The tempestuous relation between Marx and Bakunin is a well known legacy of the history of western socialism. As co-members of the International Working Men’s Association, they seem to have devoted as much energy battling one another as their common enemy, the capitalist system… [read more]

Liberal academics like to couple, on the one hand, some of Hegel’s absurd lines about non-Western civilizations (Asian, African, Indigenous-American), and on the other, his defense of the virtues of the State and his opposition to the celebration of incipient liberal democracy… [read more]

Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The… [read more]

On International Women’s day this past March, a global campaign was launched to tackle gender inequality and violence against women. This is certainly a much-needed campaign, especially if we look at what women have experienced over the last few years. For instance, in the United… [read more]

With Hegel’s metaphysics attracting renewed attention, it is time to address a long-standing criticism: Scholars from Marx to Popper and Habermas have worried that Hegel’s metaphysics has anti-individualist and authoritarian implications, which are particularly pronounced in his… [read more]

Writing is lossy. A writer cannot convey to a reader an exact idea as they envisioned it in their minds. If they describe white sands and turquoise seas, the reader will contribute to this construction: some might borrow elements from Greece, others from Jamaica. If a… [read more]

What is the contemporary, and what may be the future, function of science in society? Some things about science already win general acceptance. Science is an integral part both of the material and economic life of our times and of the ideas which guide and inspire it. Science… [read more]

If you have been around all the machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff, you surely have already seen this: [read more]

In his controversy with the Lefts, Kautsky declared that imperialism was “merely a system of foreign policy” (namely, annexation), and that it would be wrong to describe as imperialism a definite economic stage, or level, in the development of capitalism. Kautsky is… [read more]

The cyclic revival of “Roman Antiquity” and “European Aristocracy” and “the Roaring ’20s” and “the ’70s” and “the ’80s” in Western fashion and mass-media, always curated so as to avoid improper focus on imperial genocide or slavery, resembles nothing so much as the boom-and-bust… [read more]

The world today is divided into two halves: the one where capitalism is exercised to full consequence, and the one where socialism has taken root. However, we cannot group all countries under a capitalist life-system in one single bucket. There are marked differences among them. [read more]

The relationship between the arts and politics is one of great theoretical importance. According to Dialectical Materialism, the arts and politics are neither separable nor equivalent. [read more]

Threatened with disintegration by the double-fisted attack of the working class movement and the liberation movement, capitalism had to launch a series of reforms in order to build a protective armour around the inner workings of its system. [read more]

As a soldier, Alberto Bayo fought in the Rif War and against the fascists in Spain. As a teacher, he taught Fidel, Che, and the revolutionaries who would one day liberate Cuba. [read more]

How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. [read more]

If you ever look at a list of basic words in a number of languages from around the world, you will be struck at once by one observation in particular: the words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’. In language after language after language, we find that the word for ‘mother’ is something… [read more]

A leading cause of leading Western powers’ newfound focus on the Asia-Pacific region has been its increasing economic prosperity since the end of European and American colonial rule. While the West once held a monopoly on the modern industrialized economy, the undermining of this… [read more]

In my past life as an evangelical for social action, I had a much-photocopied dossier in my desk drawer from the Procter & Gamble corporation. This surreal document was the company’s sadly necessary response to the urban legend that the manufacturer of Tide, Crest and Dawn was… [read more]

The value and transcendental character of the thought and political, scientific, cultural — historic — achievements of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin have long been a universally recognized fact. Even the fiercest opponents of his ideas had to recognize that Lenin was a determined… [read more]

Indian freedom is not perhaps any longer a far distant dream; events are moving apace and it may become a reality sooner than we expect. British Imperialism is admittedly in a tight corner. Germany is about to topple down, France is tottering, even the United States is shaky. And… [read more]

1. Study diligently, grasp essentials. Concentrate on one subject rather than seeking superficial knowledge of many. [read more]

Russia was an industrially backward country and for that reason her labour movement began to develop only in the 1890s — at the time when in a number of other countries the working class, armed with the experience of the 1848 Revolution and of the Paris Commune of 1871, was… [read more]

What is the general trend of history, and what do communists have to do with it? [read more]

The publication by a small group of “Left Communists” of their journal Kommunist, and of their “theses,” strikingly confirms my views expressed in the pamphlet The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government. There could not be better confirmation, in political… [read more]

Britain and France are the most civilized countries in the world. London and Paris are the world’s capitals, with populations of six and three million, respectively. The distance between them is an eight- to nine-hour journey. One can imagine how great is the commercial… [read more]

1. Anarchism, in the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1866-) of its existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation. These… [read more]

The Russian workers in practically all the large cities of Russia have already made their response in connection with the death of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. In one way or another, they expressed their attitude to the writer who produced a number of most remarkable works of art… [read more]

When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis — who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination — even if they were all degenerates like Hitler… [read more]

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. [read more]

Trotskyism is not a one-man affair. It is not a peculiarity of an individual. Trotskyism is a social phenomenon. The fact that Trotsky happened to be in the revolution adds a certain prestige to his utterances in the eyes of the unwary. In this, as in many other instances, the… [read more]

Friends who live far away necessarily write to each other a lot. Sometimes a stray idea from this correspondence gets developed into an essay, but more often than not it’s forgotten. We decided to collect and share a few instances of wordplay to save them from oblivion, because… [read more]

A short time ago I told Comrade Hu Yaobang that I wanted to talk with the propaganda departments about problems on the ideological front, especially those in literature and art. [read more]

In theoretical confrontations with consumerism, Marx’s position is a most peculiar one: he is omnipresent, yet, at the same time, imperceptible. So much has happened in the field of consumer studies since its incipient days and yet seemingly little which does not ultimately… [read more]

This is a book not only about poetry but also about the sources of poetry. Poetry is written in language and therefore it is a book about the sources of languages. Language is a social product, the instrument whereby men communicate and persuade each other; thus the study of… [read more]

Reading the Communist Manifesto today, it is impossible not to be struck by the confidence with which it conceptualises history. It pulsates with vitality, vision, verve. The positive energy of this bold grand narrative stands in such stark contrast to the negative and… [read more]

Over the years I have told a number of friends that, if I had had access to a nuclear device when I was in seventh grade, there would be a huge crater in upstate New York centered on what used to be West Seneca Junior High School. [read more]

To the novice, any two dense texts (e.g. Heidegger vs. Hegel) are equally impenetrable. Same goes for most of the Marxist tradition, which has never shied from developing its own jargon. But this opacity to outsiders is a false equivalence; that is, it’s concealing a difference… [read more]

If in the Red Army our strategic and tactical principles are to conserve and cherish our forces, to avoid being crushed piecemeal by the enemy, to avoid engagement with him under unfavourable conditions and to concentrate an overwhelming force to attack him in a relatively weak… [read more]

It was no ordinary postwar crisis which Western Europe faced in the 1940s and 1950s. The bourgeoisie had to rebuild capitalist states at a time when socialism had already proved itself in the Soviet Union, and in a period when the Red Army of the Soviets had aided groups of… [read more]

When people complain about sexually objectified images of women in advertising and other media, a typical MRA troll move is to counter that men are also sexually objectified. Male models are sex objects too, says the troll: impossibly ripped and handsome studs, sexy and… [read more]

This is a unique revolution which some people maintain contradicts one of the most orthodox premises of the revolutionary movement, expressed by Lenin: “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” It would be suitable to say that revolutionary theory, as… [read more]

The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest… [read more]

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary renowned for his presentation of the materialist point of view. [read more]

Despite the desires of its pontiffs and overseers, the capitalist literary process does not manage to escape the germs that creep into it from the base structure on which it rests, and to which it is tethered. The inherent contradictions — the growing and mortal contradictions… [read more]

In his 1947 essay ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events’, Thomas Mann evaluates in the following way Friedrich Nietzsche’s attitude to the worker: [read more]

How often do we hear: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’? Known as ‘Thesis Eleven,’ Marx’s challenge comes at the end of a couple of pages of rough notes in preparation for a 65-page chapter on Ludwig… [read more]

Volume I of Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My Struggle] was published in 1925. Volume II was published in 1926. It’s important to bear these dates in mind because, according to historian David Schmitz, in 1933, when Hitler first became Chancellor of Germany, US officialdom was… [read more]

The pen is a major tool for exercising leadership, so leading comrades should learn to write. Holding meetings is essential to leadership, but it is always a small number of people who can attend meetings; even when you make an important report, the audience will number no more… [read more]

From 1850 until his death in 1880, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert compiled a “Dictionary of Received Ideas” as his catalogue of stupidities, inanities and misinformation. In this word association game, “Malthus” summoned up “infamous,” and “Louis XVI” evoked “unfortunate.”… [read more]

Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The teachings of Communism contain the material for a new religion which, unlike any other religion, appeals not merely to the heart and emotions, but at the same time to the brain, the organ of knowledge. From all other earthly knowledge… [read more]

If today we analyze On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, read by Khrushchev at a closed door session during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later hailed as the Secret Report, one detail immediately draws our… [read more]

Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, for it is a construction. The riddle of the idea of love is the mystery of how it comes into being. The most interesting point, at its core, is not the question of the ecstasy of beginnings. There is of course an ecstasy of… [read more]

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said, “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.” Lenin often called this law the essence… [read more]

Democracy is a common value of humanity and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people. Over the past hundred years, the Party has led the people in realizing people’s democracy in China. The Chinese people now truly hold in… [read more]

Albanian comrades should not be in a hurry to establish collective farms. Albania is a backward mountainous country. Even in the Soviet Union we do not have collective farms in mountainous regions. This is why collective farms need not be formed in Albania right now. If the… [read more]

Upon settling in the countryside, I saw firsthand the power of dripping water drilling through rock. That image, which captured the spirit of persistence, has stayed with me all these years. It has become a well-worn source for contemplating life and movement. [read more]

I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is… [read more]

Popular opinion on whether any given piece of media constitutes “a critique” is often split. Some people, for example, claim that Breaking Bad criticizes sexism, whereas others think it’s a sexist show. In this essay I want to shed some light on the different theories of… [read more]

A hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. It will be easy to twist what I’m about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar… [read more]

The present rural policy of the Party is not one of Agrarian Revolution as during the ten years’ civil war, but is a rural policy for the National United Front Against Japan. The whole Party should carry out the Central Committee’s directives of July 7 and December 25, 1940, and… [read more]

1. Being Chavista means valorizing and being guided by LOVE: love for one’s neighbor, for one’s country, for those who suffer, for the People. It means knowing how to listen to those who most need to be heard and learning, together, how to handle problems — with… [read more]

Dialectical materialism is the worldview and methodology of Chinese Communists. Mao Zedong once said that Marxism consists of several branches of learning, but the foundation is Marxist philosophy. In his works produced during the years of the revolutionary war such as Oppose… [read more]

Clevinger knew so much because Clevinger was a genius with a pounding heart and blanching face. He was a gangling, gawky, feverish, famish-eyed brain. As a Harvard undergraduate he had won prizes in scholarship for just about everything, and the only reason he had not won prizes… [read more]

It is common to say that something is good in theory but not in practice. I always want to say, then it is not such a good theory, is it? To be good in theory but not in practice posits a relation between theory and practice that places theory prior to practice, both… [read more]

Howard: Should war come, Mr. Stalin, where is it most likely to break out? Where are the war clouds the most menacing, in the East or in the West? [read more]

I’ve been writing a four-part article for Field Newspaper Syndicate at the beginning of each year for several years now and in 1980, mindful of the approach of the year 1984, FNS asked me to write a thorough critique of George Orwell’s novel 1984. I was… [read more]

This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks, by way of explanation and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic — both in general and in particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as about its relation to the modern critical… [read more]

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the… [read more]

In 1976, after the death of Zhou Enlai, the Gang of Four initiated the Criticize Deng and Oppose the Rehabilitation of Right-leaning Elements campaign. As part of this campaign they passed around pamphlets titled Criticism of the Three Poisonous Weeds, which… [read more]

This article is a further attempt to analyze the Gang of Four. After my first article entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Gang of Four” was published, I received many letters from readers questioning certain points made and asking about other aspects. In this article, I again use… [read more]

Q. For more than a month, China’s press has carried many articles on the crimes of the Gang of Four which brought disasters to China and her people. The disclosure of these facts is shocking, but the question I am presently concerned with is this: if the Gang of… [read more]

First of all: Socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, not any other “ism.” The guiding principles of scientific socialism thus cannot be abandoned. Our Party has always emphasized adherence to the basic principles of scientific socialism, but adapted to the… [read more]

It’s possible to discern a bifurcation in the theoretical history of Marxism. If we represent this history as a great tree that splits near the base into two thick, well-defined branches — which in turn have divisions and subdivisions of their own — this would not be far removed… [read more]

If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now… [read more]

There’s an ongoing debate within Marx studies over what’s called “Marx’s labor theory of value.” According to some, it’s an empirical and predictive law about prices that can be verified using quantitative methods — let’s call this tendency empirical Marxism. According to others… [read more]

I was here in Guangdong in 1984. At that time rural reform had been under way for several years, and we were just beginning to introduce urban reform and to establish special economic zones. Eight years have passed since then. This time, during my trip here, I have found that the… [read more]

The purpose of this essay is to investigate in detail the notion of “dialectic,” and more particularly to do so by looking at the origins and operational logic of Mao Ze-dong’s military strategy. We are all aware of the Western dialectical tradition in philosophy; Hegel in… [read more]

We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags: [read more]

What is dialectics? Here are two definitions: [read more]

Engels said in 1874, discussing Polish independence: “A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.” This line, and other similar ones by Marx and Engels, are celebrated for their incipient proletarian internationalism. However, they are often subtly misinterpreted… [read more]

In his “Preface to the First German Edition” of the first volume of Capital, Marx wrote: “It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” Marx devoted his whole life to the study of capitalist economy, which had by then… [read more]

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. [read more]

Visiting Brazil to launch his new book War and Revolution, the Italian professor from the University of Urbino made himself available for an interview with the editor-in-chief of Opera Magazine Pedro Marin and columnist and former international correspondent… [read more]

Let us broach a polemical subject. The British author George Orwell is very well known for works such as Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Throughout 2022 I intend to discuss each of these… [read more]

Despite all the wrongheaded effort on the part of “Anarcho-Communists,” the chasm between Marxism and Anarchism remains fundamental and unbridgeable. Engels and Lenin are often cited, but Marx was explicit, among other occasions, in this tear-down of Bakunin’s work. [read more]

You can identify a Very Important Person because they get the proper VIP treatment: they come surrounded by an entourage of PR gurus, secretaries, agents, media handlers and bodyguards. Access to the VIP is limited and controlled, their public appearances are stage managed, their… [read more]

Geek culture dominates popular media. Comic-book films like Iron Man, The Dark Knight (both 2008) and The Avengers (2012) are among Hollywood’s highest-grossing blockbusters, while geek/slacker comedies like Superbad and Knocked Up… [read more]

The question has often been asked, in what degree are the different classes of society useful or even necessary? And the answer was naturally a different one for every different epoch of history considered. There was undoubtedly a time when a territorial aristocracy was an… [read more]

If the goal is emancipation, there’s no alternative to relentless, impeccable, fact- and trajectory-focused historical education. We all need to become decent students and able teachers of history. The teaching of history as a “sack of potatoes” is a vulnerability in capitalism… [read more]

2021 will go down in history. [read more]

Domenico Losurdo and William Clare Roberts are not often mentioned in the same breath. While they are both central theoretical reference points for Red Sails, it must be admitted that they make for an odd couple. Losurdo is concerned primarily with criticizing Western… [read more]

The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence — one of the “essentials,” one of the principal (if not the principal) characteristics or features — of dialectics. [read more]

In capitalism, we get most of the things we need to survive through exchange. Commodities are useful things people exchange. The fact that they’re exchanged is what makes them commodities. Each one has a double character: [read more]

The recent coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan appears to be the latest and greatest “Legitimacy Challenge” to the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to Tsinghua law professor Xu Zhangrun. In his essay titled “Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear,” Xu lays out nine criticisms… [read more]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. [read more]

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October, 1966, in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and it began spreading eastward through the Black urban ghetto colonies across the country. [read more]

Whither is the NEP leading us: Toward capitalism or toward socialism? This is, of course, the central question. The market, the free trade in grain, competition, leases, concessions — what will be the upshot of all this? If you give the devil a finger, mightn’t it be necessary to… [read more]

I do not like to get into useless fights about “what Lenin truly meant” or “what Lenin would have wanted.” It’s not a discussion I can settle, and not even a discussion I care to settle. Instead, I want to explain what I take from his work. To this end, I will refer to… [read more]

People who read the news are probably accustomed to a type of story that keeps making headlines, and it goes like this: someone acting in the name of capital and/or white supremacy engages in an act of violence and is treated with what is relative leniency or understanding… [read more]

Leaving it to the bourgeois scholars to absorb themselves in discussion of the question of the superiority of one sex over the other, or in the weighing of brains and the comparing of the psychological structure of men and women, the followers of historical materialism fully… [read more]

Critics (of books or drama) often use two rather singular arguments. The first consists in suddenly deciding that the true subject of criticism is ineffable, and criticism, as a consequence, unnecessary. The other, which also reappears periodically, consists in confessing that… [read more]

The category of “Really Existing Socialism” is usually invoked, both by proponents and detractors, in conversations about discrepancies between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. The general idea is that revolutionary statesmen — say, Stalin — fell short in some… [read more]

1. Aristocratic Marxism defines itself in opposition to moralism. Feelings associated with powerlessness (for Spinoza, the sad affects; for Nietzsche, slave morality or ressentiment) are held to be an obstacle to the self-emancipation of the working… [read more]

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding… [read more]

It has been said that we are living in “an era of primitive accumulation.” Whether or not processes of primitive accumulation especially mark the present, invocations of the term certainly do. When Taiaiake Alfred credits Glen Coulthard with having “rescued Karl Marx from his… [read more]

If white radicals are serious about revolution, they are going to have to discard a lot of bullshit ideology created by and for educated white middle-class males. A good example of what has to go is the popular theory of consumerism. [read more]

Constitutional illusions are what we call a political error when people believe in the existence of a normal, juridical, orderly and legalised — in short, “constitutional” — system, although it does not really exist. At first glance it may appear that in Russia today, July 1917… [read more]

In 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Italian journalist and liberal politician Jas Gawronski interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana. In the course of the conversation Fidel Castro defends the legitimacy of socialism in China and Vietnam, explains why he has some… [read more]

My noble friend, Lala Ram Saran Das, has asked me to write an introduction to his poetical work, The Dreamland. I am neither a poet nor a litterateur, neither am I a journalist nor a critic. Hence, by no stretch of imagination can I find the justification of the demand. [read more]

Our movement is passing through a very important phase at present. After a year’s fierce struggle some definite proposals regarding constitutional reforms have been formulated by the Round Table Conference, and the Congress leaders invited […] think it desirable in the present… [read more]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly… [read more]

The discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492 is generally regarded as the beginning of global history. Not only because the Great Voyages discovered the entire face of the earth and connected all of humanity, but also because a modern civilization emerged from the West and… [read more]

In 2013, in the wake of the boom of the canonical “BitCoin,” using some of the same technological principles but tapping into contemporary internet-meme culture, “DogeCoin” was born. Despite its origins as a joke, on 5 May 2021 it reached a market capitalization of… [read more]

There is a widespread assumption that the violence and destruction witnessed over the last week are an aberration to the American experience. Countless headlines and social media posts, written in response to the latest onslaught of violence unleashed by the police against… [read more]

In the year 2000 the project of Pastors For Peace, run by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, had the opportunity to interview Assata Shakur, a Black revolutionary from the United States, in Havana. [read more]

What can we make of the tendency of Westerners to flippantly regurgitate the accusation of “brainwashing” against another country and its people, but then display indignation when that same allegation is made about their own? [read more]

Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people, that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naive. [read more]

The distinguishing feature of the period in which Sismondi wrote was the rapid development of exchange (what in modern terminology we refer to as “money economy”), which manifested particularly sharply after the remnants of feudalism were destroyed by the French… [read more]

What’s the difference between a fistfight and an argument? Both exist on a spectrum between dirty and clean. Both have to do with ego, or principle, or some weird mix of the two. Fistfights may end in injury or death for the combatants, so it seems like people should take them… [read more]

We are publishing this article by For Ever, even though it is a jumble of arrant nonsense and meaningless jargon. In the opinion of For Ever, the Weimar State is a Marxist State; we at the Ordine Nuovo are State-worshippers who want the State to exist… [read more]

Domenico Losurdo, at the time Professor Emeritus at the University of Urbino in Italy, answers questions on the basis of two of his works: “Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History” (2013) and “The Absent Left: Crisis, the Society of the Spectacle, War” (2014). [read more]

The third chapter of Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts & Reds” is often seen stand-alone under the title “Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut.” Though it is amazing that such a brilliant piece of writing is widely available, and though it definitely holds up on its own, I tend to… [read more]

Before I discovered Marxism, I discovered feminism. And before I discovered feminism, I used to be a chauvinistic liberal. As I grow older I sometimes like to look back and examine how this particular trajectory — of arriving at Marxism from a standard petty-bourgeois background… [read more]

The Bolshevik revolution has now definitively become part of the general revolution of the Russian people. As of two months ago the maximalists played the role of agitators against stagnation, urging the forward march not to slow down towards a premature settlement — one which… [read more]

I am very happy to meet fellow comrades. It is not easy to meet in person, as North and South America are far away from China, separated by the Pacific Ocean, in addition to the man-made obstacles presented by the United States. At present, China has not established diplomatic… [read more]

The past two decades, which have witnessed the collapse of European Imperialism and the progressive elimination of Western Colonialism from Asia and Africa, have witnessed also the introduction of a new form of Colonialism into the point-of-intersection of those two continents. [read more]

Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of… [read more]

The dispute between some self-identified feminists and trans persons, trans women especially, and trans-supporting feminists has erupted into a full-scale ideological war. Once at the level of conflict, officially undeclared, we have moved into the territory of “you are either… [read more]

US Presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings due to war. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90% in 2001 as the wrathful nation geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush ranks second place with 89% in 1991, right as the US… [read more]

On July 26, 2020 I sat down for two hours and laid out on Twitter why I was skeptical of accusations that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghur people in its western province of Xinjiang. I spoke out, despite lacking professional credentials, because I was frustrated… [read more]

On the question of minority nationalities, I am still a pupil. You comrades have done more research on this question than I have and you are specialized in this field of work. Today I shall speak mainly on the issue of minority nationalities in connection with the situation in… [read more]

Khrushchev? What good has Khrushchev ever done? [read more]

A United States still struggling through the pandemic was also recently hit by a major snow storm. To date, 37 states have already faced emergency winter conditions, with the southwestern state of Texas being hit the hardest, where temperatures have dropped below -20 degrees… [read more]

Most of what we hear about Tiananmen in 1989 focuses on student activists, since they dominated Tiananmen square itself and waved banners demanding “freedom and democracy.” However, the real history of the protests is a bit more complex. [read more]

Iain M. Banks was a Scottish fiction writer. His most famous work, the Culture series, centers on a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced artificial intelligences living in constructed habitats spread across the Milky Way. In this essay he… [read more]

At the beginning of every essay, a writer has to decide how familiar their intended audience is with the terms they’ll be using. The focus of this essay, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, occupies a strange position in that it’s both niche and mainstream (e.g. spellcheck… [read more]

There are four things one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context. [read more]

Factories were designed by capitalists as exploitative panopticon enclosures. Nevertheless, they socialized workers, and became sites of organization and struggle. Yasha Levine’s superb research into surveillance technology should not lead to numbing cynicism about the potential… [read more]

The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor. It, therefore, goes without saying that only that political economy which recognized labor as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no longer regarded… [read more]

Comrades! You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general. Our aim is to ensure that revolutionary literature and art follow the correct path of development… [read more]

There’s a common trope in media where it’s revealed, most often near the end of the story (but sometimes right off the bat), that trying too hard to do good makes you evil. Game of Thrones, HBO’s Watchmen, The Hunger Games, and many other shows, movies… [read more]

A number of Socialists have recently launched a veritable crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to label this or that act authoritarian for them to condemn it. This summary procedure is abused to such an extent that it has become… [read more]

A while back a friend was illustrating the many ways in which Slavoj Zizek fell short as a Marxist theorist (I had retained some sympathies from when I first discovered him as a liberal) with a pretty bad bit of writing on Mao Zedong. To Zizek’s credit, as usual, it’s at least… [read more]

In 1818, in the middle of the Restoration and just at that time when the collapse of the French Revolution seemed obvious to all, some of those who had initially welcomed the events of 1789 now placed them at arms length; for them it had become a colossal misunderstanding or… [read more]

I have long decried the fact that the right wants power while the left wants approval. This was never more evident that in the months up to and including the last election when the Tories and Libdems bent truth and law to breaking point, while Labour bent over backwards to prove… [read more]

Emil Ludwig was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical “greats.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow on 13 December 1931. [read more]

H. G. Wells was a very famous English novelist, and has been referred to as the “Shakespeare of science fiction.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin during his trip to the USSR in 1934. [read more]

Nowadays it is almost commonplace to recognize that the fall of the USSR was a turning point in world history, after which market economy and Western-style democracy became almost unquestionable values. What is less discussed is the extent to which this process controls not only… [read more]

We should understand there is a difference between the rebellion of the anarchists and the black revolution or liberation of the black colony. [read more]

After World War I, I made my living in Paris, then as a retoucher at a photographer’s, now as painter of “Chinese antiquities” (made in France!). I would distribute leaflets denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonialists in Viet Nam. [read more]

In this paper I propose briefly to re-visit Francis Fukuyama’s in/famous end-of-history hypothesis, a little more than twenty years after the publication of his original essay in The National Interest. I will not delve again into the details of Fukuyama’s conception or… [read more]

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor… [read more]

We did a great deal of work between 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and 1976, when Chairman Mao Zedong passed away. We were particularly successful during the period of transition from new-democratic revolution to socialist revolution, in which we carried… [read more]

During the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main — if not sole — organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction… [read more]

Far too much has already been said and written about Noam Chomsky, and some of it has the counter-productive effect of further enhancing his myth. This is because his fans often read his being attacked from “both the right and the left” as inherent proof of his brilliance. The… [read more]

Not too many years ago, when protesters were running riot through the streets, disrupting meetings of the WTO, G7, and other international organizations, the Canadian newspaper The National Post served up a flattering and generous portrait of young people who had… [read more]

Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the… [read more]

When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves. [read more]

White Supremacy is having a good month: On March 5th, the ACLU put its weight behind Pro Football Inc.’s fight to keep its Washington Redskins trademark. A few days later, legal scholars from the right and permissible left along with The New Republic scolded Oklahoma University… [read more]

The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow… [read more]

Whenever there is a political incident in Latin America, instead of informing and clarifying, many “experts” set out to insist over and over that the situation is too complex to be understood in terms of archaic left-right dichotomies. [read more]

HackerNews is a discussion forum hosted by YCombinator, Silicon Valley’s premier “startup accelerator” investment fund. It has a longstanding and reflexive hostility to any ideas critical of the tech-worker turf, so I was surprised when a write-up of how to escape “toxicity in… [read more]

“Free market capitalism” is in terminal decline, to be replaced in this century or early in the next with state capitalism and other presently undeveloped form of socialist hybrid states. The decline is structural, political, but also social and cultural. By the end of February… [read more]

There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the… [read more]

In the last few months two men have asked me to read their unpublished manuscripts and give them my opinion, because they value my opinion. Indirectly and with great euphemism they gave me to understand that they were worried about the presence of problematic ideological elements… [read more]

The universal has been blunted by difference, language games have overthrown universal reason, and solidarity has been betrayed by individualism: a common, severe doxa in our age of austerity. At the root of this threefold betrayal is the principle of identity which has allegedly… [read more]

Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the… [read more]

On my view, the core Marxist insight is the following: Feudal lords were the masters of feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself. [read more]

The US tried hard to build Fidel Castro into a boogeyman. We translated this 1991 interview to help dismantle the myth. Holding forth on immigration and environmentalism, Castro embodies what Muriel Rukeyser said about communists being “exiles from the future.” [read more]