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• The legacy of Charles Darwin - L’héritage de Charles Darwin
  21 April 2015, by Robert Paris

  The legacy of Charles Darwin
  150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species
  Roy Farrar, from The Socialist (weekly paper of CWI England and Wales)
  Charles Darwin’s theory of ’natural selection’ changed the way that we look at ourselves. It contradicted the idea of an outside ’intelligent designer’, so it met a reaction from the religious establishment that still exists in part today. Some schools, particularly in the US, are teaching evolution as ’one point of view’ (…)

• 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 (…)

• Communisme et Trotskisme en Grèce
  18 February, by Robert Paris

  Communisme et Trotskisme en Grèce
  The domination of the Thermidorian regime of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the bureaucratisation of the regime, the overthrow of the soviet system, the revision of the Constitution of October, the bureaucratic structure of the plan, the industrialisation (at first at snail’s pace, later at maximum) and collectivisation, and the incorporation of the kulak into Socialism (“Kulaks enrich yourselves”), the crisis in the relations between town and country (the (…)

• Indochina and revolution
  22 May 2008, by Robert Paris

  On Vietnam
  The text below is extracted from Sur le Vietnam, a series of articles published in Informations et Correspondences ouvrières from the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, at the height of the movement against the Vietnam war in Europe and North America. Whilst this description as a whole has not hitherto appeared in English, the final chapter, The Saigon Insurrection of 23 September 1945, was the only account of the events available in Britain for many years, having been first (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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. (…)

• 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 (…)

• John Brown, Warrior of the Abolitionist Revolution
  12 October 2018

  Speech to the Court at his Trial, after his conviction (2 November 1859) :
  “In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves.…”
  John Brown, Warrior of the Abolitionist Revolution
  John Brown was a revolutionary militant of liberty. There was nothing alien or exotic about him; he was a genuine growth of the American soil. The roots of his family tree on both sides reached back among the first English settlers of (…)

• 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 mathematics, (…)

• Religion : its social roots and role
  2 June 2008, by Robert Paris

  Definitions of religion, like definitions of the state, generally tell us more about the social and political allegiances of the author of a given definition than about the true nature of religion or the state. Loyalties – that is, class interests and class outlook – are transferred into definitions; especially is this true of religion. Typical of such definitions is a theologian’s formula for Christianity as ‘the synthesis of the highest aspirations of man’. The fact that definitions are (…)