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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
'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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Jurgen Habermas: A New Eclecticism
“Jürgen Habermas is at present the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School and the only one as yet well-known outside the Federal German Republic. In an article in nlr 63, I discussed the work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the original nucleus of the . . .” read more
Armed Insurrection and Dual Power
“The years 1928–35 are famous in Comintern history as the ‘Third Period’, the period of class against class, of ‘social-fascism’, and of the all-out struggle of Communist Parties in Europe and the usa to overthrow democratic and fascist bourgeois states in complete isolation from any other political . . .” read more
Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution
“One of the most dramatic, yet shadowy, events touched upon by Guiseppe Fiori in his Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary is the disagreement between Gramsci on the one hand and Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party on the other, after the political ‘turn’ brought about by the . . .” read more
Presentation of Blanqui
“The lifetime of Auguste Blanqui (1805–81) coincides with the rise and fall of the secret society as an effective harbinger of socialism. Auguste Blanqui was the son of a low rank imperial official; his first recorded political involvement was in 1827 when he was wounded on the barricades; . . .” read more
Instructions for an Uprising
“An insurrection in Paris today, based on old models, has no chance of success. In 1830 popular enthusiasm alone could overthrow a power surprised and terrified by an armed uprising: an unthinkable event which went far beyond any of its predictions. This could work once. The government then . . .” read more
The Frankfurt School
“In France and Italy, the post-War period has seen the emergence of new schools of Marxist thought (Althusser, Della Volpe). In the German-speaking world, on the other hand, there is a complete continuity from the pre-War years. The veterans Lukács and Bloch are still active and influential, but . . .” read more
The First Circle
“‘For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,’ remarks one of the characters in The First Circle. This observation has always been especially true of Russia and a reading of Solzhenitsyn’s work confirms that it has as much relevance today as at any . . .” read more
The Naxalites
“On May 1st, 1969, Kanyu Sanyal, leader of the Naxalbari peasant movement in West Bengal, announced at a rally in Calcutta the formation of the ‘Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)’. The emergence of the new party aroused torrents of criticism from all other political organizations in India. Demands . . .” read more
The Question of Stalin
“When in November 1917 the Bolshevik Party unleashed an insurrection and took power, Lenin and his comrades were convinced that this was the first act in a world revolution. The process was started in Russia, not because Russia was considered internally ripe for a socialist revolution, but because . . .” read more
Vortex in India
“A Socialist revolution in India would be an event of fundamental significance to the international class struggle. An immense population of 550 million whose rural and urban masses are plunged in abysmal misery and unemployment make India one of the great potential storm-centres within world capitalism. In the . . .” read more