The work of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick contains some insights for socialists but it is not Marxian economics and is not socialist. The late twentieth-century saw the demise of many governments that viewed themselves as heirs of the ideas of Karl Marx. The failure of these regimes was seen by their opponents as the triumph of capitalism and the death of socialism. With the rise of neoliberal economics in advanced industrial countries the future of the left did indeed seem bleak. The legacy of Karl Marx and Marxian socialism, however, was far from dead. As the current global...
Read more »
“I treat the ridiculous seriously when I treat it with ridicule.” Marx explained in “On Freedom of the Press and Censorship.” Born on 5 May 1818, Karl Marx died 14th March 1883 after a long illness, his end undoubtedly being hastened by the death of his wife in 1881 and his favourite daughter, Jenny, in 1882. Marx devoted the best years of his life in the struggle for socialism and the fruits of his labours are a legacy of inestimable value to the working class. There were less than a dozen mourners for his funeral at Highgate Cemetry. You...
Read more »
The World Socialist Party is frequently lambasted for its opposition to reformism. The workers clamor for something concrete now, it is claimed , not abstract socialist principles. They demand immediate improvements that can be obtained by campaigns for legislation it is argued. The World Socialist Party case that although some reforms may be of material benefit to the working class, advocating party policy to struggle for particular reforms hinders the struggle for socialism and diverts our energies into what often results in dead-ends. We found this article by Stephanie Luce on the Labor Notes website particularly relevant in that it offers some...
Read more »
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 “society” with its own social base, relations of production, etc. This is a point of view worth discussing but, despite the Marxist terminology in which it is expressed, it is in fact not a view held by Marx himself. As the present article will try...
Read more »
This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin The Origin of Species but also of the publication of Marx’s first economic writings after his more detailed study of the workings of capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The Preface to this work contains a summary of Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history. Marx comments that during the course of his studies he reached the conclusion that the explanation of social development was not to be found merely in the realm of ideas but rather in the material conditions of life, and that...
Read more »
Engels bought a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species as soon as it was published. Two books of importance were published in 1859, one in June and the other in November. Each one stands at the opposite pole of popularity at the time they were published. And this contrast has persisted up to the present day. One hundred and fifty years after their publication, one is being celebrated as one of the most significant and audacious books ever to be published; the other is virtually forgotten. Both were written with some degree of reluctance by their authors, requiring...
Read more »
From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard Marx is again enjoying something of a revival. After his views on the globalising tendencies of capitalism, it is now his theory of crises that is attracting interest and being discussed in the media. Unfortunately not always accurately. For instance, in an article headlined “BANKING CRISIS GIVES ADDED CAPITAL TO MARX’S WRITINGS”, Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent of the (London) Times wrote (20 October): “Marx’s new relevance relates mainly to his warning about the creation of an exploitative capitalism that ends up destroying itself: ‘An over-expansion of credit can enable...
Read more »
Our subject this evening is “Socialism – Utopian and Scientific.” Most relevant in the examination of this subject is history. Not the history you have studied at school nor the history with which current literature is so preoccupied. Currently a history titled “History as Mirror” comparing the fourteenth century and its horrible conditions with the twentieth century that we know contributes very little to understanding with...
Read more »
Down through the ages there have been various interpretations of history. For example, there are the theories which see in history the working out and realization of some sort of divine plan – like Hegel’s philosophy of history, which sees the whole historical development of society as the realization stage by stage of the so-called Absolute Idea. Again, there are the various theories which see history as moving through “cycles,” every civilization passing by some inescapable necessity through the cycle of rise, plentitude of power and decline – as in Spengler’s Decline of the West or Toynbee’s Studies in...
Read more »
The Ozymandian candidate (with apologies to P.B. Shelley and Horace Smith)
Humans, alone among the mammals and other life-forms on the planet Earth, invented “no.” The power of negation lies at the root of conceptual thought, and hence of abstract thinking. And with it comes the power of deception. Deception applied to oneself is basically illusion. Error and deception make very good allies. Politicians are considered notorious liars. But are they deceiving themselves as well? Apart from questions of moral turpitude, what most politicians have to lie about is economics. They are forever making promises that they either know cannot be kept or that amount to so much pie in...
Read more »