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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
Why do these people love themselves so much? I don’t get it.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Everyone is anti-capitalist now! Good. Questions remain, though: What exactly is capitalism? And what are Communists planning to do about it?
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…
The old Lie: “Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”
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…
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…
Being a communist certainly means appealing to the class struggle waged by the oppressed (internationally, nationally, and within the family). But it also means having developed the capacity to see things in their totality.
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.
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.
Marxism, though wide-ranging and profound, can be summed up in a sentence: the pursuit of the emancipation of humankind.
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.
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…
The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote:
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 the class…”.
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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…
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…
Robert Penn Warren was a white liberal American, a “man of letters,” and he interviewed Malcolm X in 1964.
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…
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.”
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Marxism bears the marks of Hegel’s influence, and it’s foolish to attempt to rewrite that history so that he doesn’t blemish it, or to neglect this fact as if it were void of insights.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If you have been around all the machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff, you surely have already seen this:
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
1. Study diligently, grasp essentials. Concentrate on one subject rather than seeking superficial knowledge of many.
Owing to the backwardness of industry in Russia, the workers’ movement only began to develop in the nineties, when the revolutionary struggle of the working class was already taking place in a number of other countries. There had already been the experience of the great French…
What is the general trend of history, and what do communists have to do with it?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary renowned for his exposition of materialism.
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…
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…
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:
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Democracy is a value shared by all humanity and an ideal that the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people have always upheld. As we work to translate democratic values and ideals into sound and effective institutions and concrete and real democratic practice, we need to…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:
What is dialectics? Here are two definitions:
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…
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…
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
2021 will go down in history.
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…
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.
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:
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
On YouTube there are all these funny video compilations. Some are very specific and show nothing but people hurting themselves on slides or animals being clever. Others mix together everything anyone might consider funny: pranks, children being silly, failed acrobatics, etc. Most…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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?
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.
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…
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…
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…
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).
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Khrushchev? What good has Khrushchev ever done?
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…
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.
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…
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…
There are four things one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
We should understand there is a difference between the rebellion of the anarchists and the black revolution or liberation of the black colony.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.”