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• 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 (...)

• 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 dialectic of geology
  17 June 2008

  from " Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science"
  By Alan Woods and Ted Grant
  There is an English saying, "as solid as the ground under our feet." This comforting idea, however, is very far from the truth. The earth beneath our feet is not as solid as it seems. The rocks, the mountain ranges, the continents themselves, are in a continuous state of movement and change, the exact nature of which has only begun to be understood in the latter half of this century. Geology is the (...)

• 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 (...)

• The State and Revolution, Lenine
  14 May 2008

  Lenine (Septembre 1917)
  CLASS SOCIETY AND THE STATE
  1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
  What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred (...)

• STALIN RUINS THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
  19 December 2021

  C.L.LR. James
  STALIN RUINS THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
  EVEN WHILE THE STALINISTS, BY FALSIFICATION AND PHYSICAL repression, were destroying the propagandists of international Socialism, the world revolution which had seemed so remote in October, 1924, stirred itself, and even while the new theory was being made law presented the International with one of its greatest opportunities. We have to pass over how the Stalinists forced the Communist Party of Poland to support Pilsudski in the coup (...)

• 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 (...)

• 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. (...)

• Hegel’s philosophy and science
  10 February 2009

  Hegel’s philosophy and science
  Friday 1 January 2010
  Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
  Analytical Table of Contents Preliminary
  § 192 Nature has presented itself as the idea in the form of otherness. § 193 Hence nature exhibits no freedom in its existence, but only necessity and contingency. § 194 Nature is to be viewed as a system of stages, in which one stage necessarily arises from the other. § 195 Nature is, in itself a living whole. § 196 The idea as nature can be named (...)

• Proudhon
  1 March 2009, by Robert Paris

  Article of Karl Marx
  PROUDHON
  Just as the first critical moves in every science are necessarily entangled in the assumptions of the science which they are intending to combat, so Proudhon’s work Qu’est ce que la propriété? is a criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy. Since the criticism of political economy forms the chief subject of interest, we need not here examine the legal section of the book, which criticizes law from the standpoint of law. (...)