G.V. Plekhanov
On the Role of the Individual in History
(1898)
I
In the second half of the ’seventies the late Kablitz wrote an article entitled, The Mind and the Senses as Factors of Progress, in which, referring to Spencer, he argued that the senses played the principal role in human progress, and that the mind played only a secondary role, and quite a subordinate one at that. A certain “esteemed sociologist” [1*] replied to Kablitz, expressing amusement and surprise at a theory (...)
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20- ENGLISH - MATERIAL AND REVOLUTION
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Plekhanov - On the Role of the Individual in History
19 December 2019 -
A Critical Essay on Nietzsche
15 December 2019Victor Serge 1917
A Critical Essay on Nietzsche
1. A Philosopher of Violence and Authority
Dead are all the gods: now do we desire the Superman to live. The State is the death of people. Companions, the creator seeketh not corpses – and not herds or believers either. Humanity’s goal can only be reached with the most elevated types. – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
It is through these words that this creator became dear to us. We singled him out from among the heroes of life, legend, and (...) -
George Plekhanov - The Meaning of Hegel (1891)
22 octobre 2019Introduction
In 1891 the editors of Neue Zeit, theoretical magazine of the German Social Democratic Party, requested G.V. Plekhanov to write an article in connection with the 60th anniversary of Hegel’s death. Few were better qualified to deal with this subject than Plekhanov, a profound student of philosophy and the best trained Marxist theoretician of Russia at the time. Plekhanov’s philosophical writings, including his Hegel essay, were for the most part written in the heyday of his (...) -
Gracchus Babeuf 1794 - Against the Terrorist Carrier
5 October 2019Gracchus Babeuf 1794
They Want to Save Carrier; They Want to Put the Revolutionary Tribunal on Trial. People beware!
“The crimes of the people’s representatives and those of their agents must never go unpunished. No one has the right to claim himself more inviolable than other citizens.”
Declaration of the Rights of Man, art. 51
The people of Paris, the people of the whole Republic, have issued but one cry since the opening of the trial of the accomplices of the most execrable of (...) -
Private Property and Communism
17 September 2019The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But (...)
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Christian Rakovsky against Stalinism
8 September 2019Who Was Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky against Stalinism
Speech to the Fifteenth Party Congress
(December 1927)
Comrades! The sphere of international relations is that sphere which necessitates the greatest unity in the party. Our foreign enemy is the most dangerous of all enemies, both for our party and the proletarian dictatorship. [Voices: “That is way you are breaking up the party. You should have known this before! You should have remembered that on November 7th!”] (...) -
KARL MARX - THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF
6 September 2019KARL MARX
THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties (...) -
A Critique of The German Ideology
10 August 2019A Critique of The German Ideology
Preface
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which (...) -
Charles Dickens, by Mehring
31 July 2019Franz Mehring - "Charles Dickens" - (1912)
OF the three great English novelists during the long reign of Queen Victoria – Bulwer, Dickens and Thackeray – Dickens was the most loved and most read, although the literature and philosophy of the Continent were much less familiar to him than to either of his classically educated rivals. Yet he easily outstripped them by his original talent and by that indomitable energy for work and life which was perhaps his most outstanding quality.
He (...) -
Charles Fourier, “The Rise of Commerce and the Birth of Political Economy”
15 July 2019Charles Fourier, “The Rise of Commerce and the Birth of Political Economy”
Well! Why have nations taken so long to realise that the commercial order is a temporary monstrosity, an utterly senseless system that places the three productive classes — proprietors, farmers and manufacturers — at the mercy of a parasitical class which has no national loyalty and which can do whatever it wishes with the fruits of industry over which it exercises arbitrary control? So faulty a system is (...)