by Adam Buick, in Critique (Glasgow) . – 1975 (5) : pp. 59-70 Critique has recently published the translation of an article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes – and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a transitional...
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The Left
The Myth of the Transitional Society
Castro’s Brand of Capitalism
On this day in 1959 Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba. He officially stepped down two years ago. The lie that Cuba is or was communist remains however and it is primarily with this in mind that SOYMB offers the following article, which first appeared in the Socialist Standard of...
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The prophet debunked
Trotsky. A Biography. By Robert Service. Macmillan. 624pp. £25. Were Trotsky alive today, he would have the editors of this book shot. It is riddled with irritating errors. Round brackets close square; names change spelling; weird sentences like the idea that Russian radicals “took the bits of Marxism they disliked and discarded the rest”...
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Why didn’t anyone wake me up while the revolution was going on? (Why we are not Leftists)
It is not uncommon to hear leftists talk knowingly of “ongoing struggles” when they project the day after tomorrow of an anti-capitalist revolution, as if it weren’t really over yet with the expropriation of the capitalist class. The working class must evidently “smash” the capitalist state and set up a “proletarian” régime holding...
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Post-modern guru
Goodbye Mr Socialism. Radical Politics in the 21st Century. Antonio Negri with Raf Scelsi. Serpents Tail Press, London, 2008 The Italian intellectual, Toni Negri, who was once sentenced to jail in Italy for giving a theoretical defense of urban terrorism, is highly regarded in some circles. The blurb on the back of this book...
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Political Reality
Bianca Jagger participating in a demonstration during the United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland “The politicians just don’t seem to get the seriousness of the global warming crisis. Scientists attending the recent UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, complained that the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality on climate change is...
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Manufactured Scarcity
Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard Green Capitalism. Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance. By James Heartfield. www.heartfield.org .2008 James Heartfield is associated with the former Trotskyist (British) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which used to publish Living Marxism (LM) and has moved on considerably since “the collapse of...
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Hugo Chávez the maoist and Nicolas Sarkozy the socialist
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who during his ten years in power has introduced extensive state-capitalist measures based on the country’s oil wealth, has embarrassed his international fan club in recent weeks with a series of gaffes when on diplomatic business. Chávez has long entertained close relations with such “anti-imperialists” as Colonel...
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Trotskyist Laundry List
One of the most laughable aspects of Trotskyist politics is the continual trotting out of laundry lists of demands. Stalinist/Maoist demands and tactics tend to be cynically practical – e.g.. the alliance of the USSR and Nazi Germany between 1939-41. Trotskyists, on the other hand, make demands that are so unreal they make Charles...
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Cuba’s wage system
Earlier this year, when in June the Cuban government, now under Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, announced a new system of wage payments, the Guardian (13 June) wrote that Cuba had “abandoned its egalitarian wages system”. This brought a response (20 June) from Helen Yaffe, author of Ermesto Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution: “In...
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