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Stalin, Lenin and 'Leninism'

“It has been rightly said that the relationship between Lenin and Stalin ‘is certainly one of the most complex problems that has to be faced’ in studying Soviet history and analysing Stalinism. However, the principal difficulty is not in understanding how deep the differences are between Lenin’s conceptions . . .” read more

The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy

“The relationship between advanced capitalism and democracy contains two paradoxes—one Marxist and one bourgeois. Any serious Marxist analysis has to confront the following question: How has it come about that, in the major and most advanced capitalist countries, a tiny minority class—the bourgeoisie—rules by means of democratic forms? . . .” read more

Althusser and Stalinism

“The purpose of the following article and its sequel (which will appear in nlr 103) is simply to add a further exploratory contribution, once again partial and full of gaps, to my long-standing research on the genesis of contemporary Marxism. Apart from obvious personal limitations, which naturally . . .” read more

The Twilight of the British State

“‘External conflicts between states form the shape of the state. I am assuming this “shape” to mean—by contrast with internal social development—the external configuration, the size of a state, its contiguity (whether strict or loose), and even its ethnic composition . . . We must stress that in . . .” read more

Is US Imperialism Resurgent?

“The Petras and Rhodes article in nlr 97, ‘The Reconsolidation of us Hegemony’ argues that, contrary to the view of many, the United States is not on the decline as a world power. It states: 1. that although the usa suffered some relatively minor setbacks . . .” read more

Rosa Luxemburg: A Re-assessment

“In an essay which she wrote in 1903 (‘Progress and Stagnation in Marxism’), Rosa Luxemburg showed how certain of Marx’s texts are discovered or forgotten according to the stage of the struggle of the proletariat. The same analysis may be applied to her own political and theoretical legacy: . . .” read more

Reply to Critics

“Albert Szymanski’s attempted refutation of our thesis on the reconsolidation of us imperialism presents a ‘summary’ which does not in fact correspond to what we actually argued; offers statistical data that is largely irrelevant to the issues at stake; ignores important aspects of our position; and is . . .” read more

Introduction to Sartre

“Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique appeared in France in 1960. It was entitled Volume i—‘A Theory of Practical Ensembles’. Its object was the abstract relationships between individuals, groups, series and collectives which Sartre called the ‘formal elements of any history’, in a world dominated by . . .” read more

'Socialism in One Country'

“I shall concentrate on a single, contemporary example: the emergence in the ussr of the ideological monstrosity of ‘socialism in one country’. A critical investigation will show: 1. that the slogan was a product of conflicts within the leadership; 2. that beyond these conflicts, the slogan represented . . .” read more

Notes on British Marxism since 1945

“‘The neo-Marxist Left which now dominates the Labour Party’, said a speaker at this year’s Conservative Party conference. Or it may have been ‘near-Marxist Left’, given the difficulty of ruling-class English with the consonant ‘r’. In other speeches either qualification was dropped: the ‘Marxist Left’ now ‘dominates the . . .” read more

Revolutionary Strategy in Europe--A Political Interview

“The revolutionary Left, and especially the Fourth International, is often accused—for example, by the leaderships of the PdUPC in Italy or the PSU and CFDT in France—of mechanically superimposing onto the reality of the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe a ‘model’ derived from the Russian revolution: . . .” read more

The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

“Today, no Marxist thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected in the West as Antonio Gramsci. Nor is any term so freely or diversely invoked on the Left as that of hegemony, to which he gave currency. Gramsci’s reputation, still local and marginal outside his native . . .” read more

Marxist Analysis and Post-Revolutionary China

“The Communist Party of China’s triumph in 1949 was an event of momentous importance. It put an end to the century of foreign intervention in China that had begun with the Opium War of 1840, and liberated a quarter of the world’s population from control by capitalism. The . . .” read more

West Germany since the War

“Thirty years after the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich and only ten years after Willy Brandt described the Bundesrepublik as ‘an economic giant, but a political dwarf’, Helmut Schmidt—in reply to the domestic and international criticism provoked by his remarks at the Puerto Rico summit conference in May, . . .” read more

US Imperialism--a Reply to Petras and Rhodes

“The article by James Petras and Robert Rhodes (‘The Reconsolidation of us Hegemony’, nlr 97) makes an important point in criticizing some interpretations of the decline of United States hegemony. However, their attempt to provide an alternative analysis ignores a number of important recent developments in . . .” read more

Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies

“All Marxists agree that manual workers directly engaged in the production of physical commodities for private capital fall into the working class. While there may be disagreement about the political and ideological significance of such workers in advanced capitalism, everyone acknowledges that they are in fact workers. There . . .” read more

The Reconsolidation of American Hegemony

“During the early part of this decade, a number of writers asserted that we were entering a new historical period marking the end of us world supremacy. Mustering an impressive set of dramatic events, the argument against the American century was quite convincing. In the so-called third . . .” read more

Workers' Control and the Historians: A New Economism

“Recently a number of labour historians have looked back into the industrial histories of Great Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have discovered what to them appears to have been the ability of certain categories of skilled workers to ‘control’ . . .” read more

Marxism: Theory of Proletarian Revolution

“The real originality of Marx and Engels lies in the field of politics, not in economics or philosophy. They were the first to discover the historical potential of the new class that capitalism had brought into existence—the modern proletariat, a class that could encompass a universal liberation from . . .” read more

Rejoinder to Jean Monds

“Jean Monds draws a valuable distinction between the workerist belief that ‘the struggle for power at the point of production leads to advances in class consciousness in and of itself and without the intervention of political organization in the working class’ and the correct assumption that ‘the key . . .” read more

Marxists and the National Question

“The aim of this article is to isolate certain key theoretical and methodological aspects of the classic Marxist debate on the national question: a debate which had its starting-point in the relatively imprecise positions developed by Marx and Engels themselves in their writings, and which was carried on . . .” read more

Spain on the Brink

“The following report is the fruit of a three-week visit to the Spanish state in February 1976. In many hours of discussion, with economists and politicians, businessmen and trade-union officials, workers and Left militants, a single, apparently simple theme oriented my enquiry. What was the concrete possibility of . . .” read more

The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau

“Six years ago, the publication of Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society gave rise to a debate between the author and myself in the columns of New Left Review. I reviewed the book and Miliband responded, presenting in the process a critique of my own Pouvoir politique . . .” read more

The Modern Janus

“The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have had others as well, and some of these have been more debated: Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the State, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses are certainly old battlefields. Yet none of . . .” read more

The New Unionism

“First, could you tell us how you became a militant trade unionist?” read more

Lukacs and Stalinism

“We shall tell them that we do your bidding and rule in your name . . . That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.” read more

Rosa Luxemburg after 1905

“As is well-known, a number of different strategic lines on the nature of the Russian revolution crystallized during and immediately after 1905, out of a debate which received its impetus from the revolutionary upheaval of that year. Rosa Luxemburg was a participant in this debate within Russian and . . .” read more

What Lies Ahead for Us?

“The Letter to Soviet Leaders that Solzhenitsyn has recently published is a disappointing document. But it is not difficult to argue with Solzhenitsyn on this occasion, so absurd are many of his propositions. Nevertheless, however great one’s first sense of disagreement and disappointment with Solzhenitsyn’s utopian and incompetent . . .” read more

The Test in Portugal

“The Military revolt which seized Lisbon and overthrew the Caetano government on 25 April 1974 toppled in a morning the most long lived fascist State in history and one of the most stable capitalist regimes anywhere this century. By the same stroke it set the stage for the . . .” read more

Solzhenitsyn, Stalinism and the October Revolution

“The Gulag Archipelago testifies to a threefold tragedy. First, the tragedy of the Stalinist purges that struck at millions of Soviet citizens, among them the majority of the old cadres of the Bolshevik party, who were innocent of the crimes they were charged with. Second, the tragedy of . . .” read more

A Political and Philosophical Interview

“Can you give us a brief sketch of your initial intellectual origins, and entry into political life?” read more

Scotland and Europe

“For a number of reasons this seems an appropriate moment to reconsider the problem of Scottish nationalism. With its November 1973 electoral victory in the Govan Constituency the Scottish National Party has recovered from its setbacks in the 1970 general election. At the same time the Kilbrandon Commission . . .” read more

Rosa Luxemburg: Barbarism and the Collapse of Capitalism

“‘Capitalism, by mightily furthering the development of the productive forces, and in virtue of its inherent contradictions, . . . provide(s) an excellent soil for the historical progress of society towards new economic and social forms.’ Rosa Luxemburg.” read more

Poulantzas and the Capitalist State

“One or two preliminary remarks about this review-article may be in order. In New Left Review 58 (November-December 1969), Nicos Poulantzas wrote a very stimulating and generous review of my book The State in Capitalist Society; and in the following issue of nlr, I took up some . . .” read more

The Working Class and the Birth of Marxism

“The theory of historical materialism makes it possible to situate Marxism itself—just as much as market economics or normative sociology—in relation to capitalist development and the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism emerged in the second half of the 1840s, in the heartlands of industrial capitalism. Its birthplaces were the . . .” read more

On Social Classes

“What are social classes in Marxist theory? They are groups of social agents, of men defined principally but not exclusively by their place in the production process, i.e. by their place in the economic sphere. The economic place of the social agents has a principal role in determining . . .” read more

Class Struggle and the Heath Government

“In the spring and summer of 1972, British miners, railwaymen and dockers each in turn successfully defied the Heath Government. On no previous occasion in British history has the administration of the day suffered such a sequence of reverses from groups of workers pursuing economic demands. The results . . .” read more

The Impasse of Italian Capitalism

“In the years immediately following the Italian surrender, from 1943 to 1948, us and British imperialism exerted their greatest efforts to restabilize bourgeois society in Italy and to crush the revolutionary movement that had arisen in the anti-fascist struggle. The Italian ruling class emerged intact if battered . . .” read more

The Left against Europe? (Special Issue)

“‘I imagine that by about the turn of the century something like a United States of Socialist Europe will exist. A timid and conservative prefiguration of these United States is naturally the Common Market, for even conservative, bourgeois politicians are beginning to sense that the nation state, at . . .” read more

Spain--The Untimely Revolution

“The Spanish revolution was the only revolution to take place in Europe during the existence of the Communist International, with the transient exception of the 1919 Hungarian soviet republic: but it took the leaders of the ‘world party’ unawares. In Manuilsky’s report to the Comintern Executive in February . . .” read more

Bolivia: Military Nationalism and the Popular Assembly

“On 7 October 1970 President Ovando was overthrown by a triumvirate representing the three branches of the armed forces, headed by General Miranda. Then, in a remarkable political action, General Torres proclaimed resistance to this junta, called on the workers, and made himself President. The triumvirate managed to . . .” read more

The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation

“Nearly half a century after its original publication in Germany, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness has at last become available in English. Those who now read the book for the first time may find its contents surprising. For the notoriety of this forbidden volume of the early . . .” read more

Letter from the editor of 'Tribune'

“Dear Comrade,” read more

The Heath Government: A New Course for British Capitalism

“The eruption of the international financial crisis last August has thrown into sharp relief an often neglected dimension of inter-imperialist contradictions—namely the relation between the domestic class struggle and the international competition of the major imperialist states. There are two ways of neglecting this relationship: one simply regards . . .” read more

British Nationalism and the EEC

“‘Whatever is decided, the City of London should remain just as prosperous. Moreover there is nothing in the Werner plan . . . to deter Britain’. The Banker, Spring 1971.” read more

Imperialism in the Seventies--Unity or Rivalry?

“This essay will discuss the effects of recent economic trends on the unity of the imperialist bloc and on the autonomy of its constituent elements—the individal nations. Three broad possibilities may be distinguished:” read more

Bangla Desh--Results and Prospects

“The struggle in Bangla Desh between the Bengali liberation forces and the armed might of West Pakistani capital represents both a continuation of the mass movement which erupted in 1968–69 and a qualitative break. In that sense we can say that the present course of events in East . . .” read more

Lukacs On His Life and Work

“Recent events in Europe have posed once again the problem of the relation of socialism to democracy. What are the fundamental differences for you between bourgeois democracy and revolutionary, socialist democracy?” read more

Internationalization of Capital and the Nation State

“Liberal models of the international economy, as of international relations in general, still spring predominantly from an early utilitarianism. The nation state is treated as the basic category in the world: the atom of the system. States are assumed to be rational, self-conscious, self-determining units, analogies of economic . . .” read more

Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America

“Debate on the Left in the last decade over the origins and present nature of Latin American societies has focused on the problem of whether they should be seen as feudal or capitalist in character. A complex and lengthy discussion has taken place whose importance is not diminished . . .” read more