Staying the course through days dark and stormy.
Althusser’s main claim to our attention is based on his attempt to establish a rapproachement between Marxism and structuralism. Since structuralism can be regarded as nothing more than a word for scientific method, we can best begin to grasp its meaning by contrasting it to the…
All philosophy that has existed so far was born of and is an expression of the intimate contradictions of society. However, no one philosophical system by itself can be taken to be the conscious expression of these contradictions — this expression can only be given by the…
The most famous statement Marx made on teleology was ostensibly against it. In addressing Lassalle on the importance of Darwin, he noted
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?
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…
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…
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…
The Trotsky-Stalin struggle is not one between two different personalities. It’s a struggle between two different principles of legitimizing power.
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.
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…
“Workers must seize the means of production!” Yes. But what does this mean in practice?
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?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.