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Articles

• Claude Lévi-Strauss 1962 History and Dialectic
  12 August 2019, by Robert Paris

  In the course of this work I have allowed myself, not without ulterior motive, to borrow a certain amount of Sartre’s vocabulary. I wanted to lead the reader to face a problem, the discussion of which will serve to introduce my conclusion. The problem is to what extent thought that can and will be both anecdotal and geometrical may yet be called dialectical. The savage mind totalizes. It claims indeed to go very much further in this direction than Sartre allows dialectical reason, for, on (...)

• The first open declaration of opposition by old Bolshevik leaders to Stalinism in 1923
  27 December 2021

  The Platform of the 46
  A week after Leon Trotsky had sent his letter to the Central Committee 46 prominent Bolsheviks, some of whom occupied leading posts in economic management, presented their own criticism of the economic and inner-Party policy of the Party leadership of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin, Rykov and Tomsky. This statement of opposition which became known as ‘The Platform of the 46’ was submitted to the Politburo on October 15, 1923, after being circulated among a number of (...)

• Revolution and counter-revolution in Spain
  19 September 2010

  FOR the new generations moving into political life a study of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 contains valuable lessons. This book, hammered out in time with the dramatic events it describes, stands in direct line with the great writings of Marx and Engels on the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. No doubt later historical research has been able to uncover from the record a more detailed account of the facts, and the reports of (...)

• Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
  4 December 2021

  C.L.R. James 1947
  Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
  Mankind has obviously reached the end of something. The crisis is absolute. Bourgeois civilisation is falling apart, and even while it collapses, devotes its main energies to the preparation of further holocausts. Not remote states on the periphery but regimes contending for world power achieve the most advanced stages of barbarism known to history. What civilised states have ever approached Nazi Germany and Stalinist (...)

• Three uprisings in South Korea
  10 July 2022, by Robert Paris

  Three uprisings in South Korea INTRODUCTION
  Let us first recall that it was British and American imperialism that demanded that Stalin militarily occupy northern Asia and notably northern Korea while they occupied the south. Let us also remember that this had no military purpose because the war was then won in Japan crushed under the bombs and which only asked to capitulate. What motivated these imperialisms was the fear of a social revolution. In Korea, struck by misery and feudalism, (...)

• Estranged Labour, Karl Marx
  25 October 2018

  "We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the (...)

• CLR JAMES AND THE NEGRO MOVEMENT IN THE USA
  22 March 2009

  C L R James 1939 The Right of Self-Determination and the Negro in the United States of North Americas
  Source: SWP New York Convention Resolutions, 11 July 1939.
  In 1930 Negroes in America constituted nearly twelve million, or 10 percent of the American population. Of these, two-thirds were still in the South, despite the war and postwar emigration to the North. In the cities of the North and East, the Negroes form only a small minority of the population, generally less than 10 percent. (...)

• Theranos Conviction Shows that Lying and Fraud are Part of the System
  19 January 2022

  Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, being recognized for her talents within the capitalist system.
  Theranos Conviction Shows that Lying and Fraud are Part of the System
  Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, a health technology company, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud investors and wire fraud. While we can all be happy that Holmes was caught in the act and has fallen from her perch of wealth and power, we should not lose sight of the larger lessons – that Holmes and (...)

• W.E.B. Du Bois and His Work
  10 March 2020

  W.E.B. Du Bois and His Work
  By William Gorman
  As he approaches eighty-two, no higher tribute can be paid William Edward Burghardt Du Bois than that it is impossible to seriously consider the Negro in America without being confronted by his name at every turn. Journalist, research scholar, sociologist, historian, novelist, pamphleteer, educator – his evolution intertwines so completely with that of the Negro people since the Civil War that his individual portrait is the collective (...)

• Communism and stalinism in USA
  27 September 2008, by Robert Paris

  The End of the Comintern And The Prospects of Labor Internationalism James P. Cannon
  Comrade Chairman, Comrades:
  The formal dissolution of the Communist International is undoubtedly an event of great historical significance, even though everybody understands that it is simply the formal certification of a fact that was long since accomplished. Some of the bourgeois commentators and politicians may exaggerate a bit when they speak of the dissolution of the Communist International as the (...)