Marxists

The road to Bolshevism: The Northern Union of Workers

Fifth in a series of articles around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 In December 1877 an explosion occurred at one of the St Petersburg armaments factories. The workers there believed it to be due to the negligence of the management. Six workers were killed. An organised group of politically conscious workers had existed in the factory for some years. Stepan Khalturin, who would be the main organiser of the Northern Union of Russian Workers and who would be hanged for an attempt to kill the Tsar, had worked there. The armaments workers decided to turn the...

“Post-materialism”: 1796, 1840s, 1970s, and today

“Let all the arts perish”, declared the first communist manifesto of relatively modern times, written by Sylvain Maréchal for the Conspiracy of Equals in France in 1796. “If need be”, he added, “as long as real equality remains!” With productive capacities as they were then, a meagre and uniform ration for all seemed to him the only answer. “But one education, but one nourishment... the same portion and the same quality of food... for each”. In the notes which he wrote in Paris in 1844, as he moved from radical democratic politics to communism, Karl Marx criticised that “crude communism” or...

Axelrod the pioneer

Among the leaders of the Russian Marxist movement, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod was singular. Almost all the others came from the upper layers of society, from families of education and culture, riches or comparative riches, and an ordered place in the world. Axelrod came from the lowest of the low, from a family of illiterate pauper Jews. His mother was intelligent and sensible, but entirely illiterate. His pious father could read the Hebrew prayers he recited, but was illiterate in Russian. Born in 1849 or 1850, Pavel passed his early childhood in a one-room family hut. His father lacked the...

The road to Bolshevism

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...

Capitalist markets block social foresight

In his book Revolution Betrayed , evidently thinking through lessons from “war communism” in 1918-21, Trotsky argued that a workers’ government (and not just in poverty-blighted Russia) would for a long time use goods and services markets to signal costs, but would push aside financial markets. “The budget and credit mechanism is wholly adequate for a planned distribution of the national income. And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they being to express the real economic relations of the present day”. Even in bourgeois economic writing, the...

Paul Burkett, 1956-2024

Paul Burkett, the prolific author on Marxist ecology, sadly died on 7 January 2024. He was aged 67 and had sudden complications from acute myeloid leukaemia. He began teaching at Syracuse University, then worked at the University of Miami and at Indiana State University for more than twenty years. He retired in 2020. At the turn of the century Burkett made several seminal contributions to the revival of Marxist ecology. His book Marx and Nature: A Red And Green Perspective (1999) re-examined Marx’s works in light of ecological questions. He made good use of the Marx and Engels Collected Works...

Big socialist debates before 1914

The best of the Second International is part of our renewal, as long as we discard the baggage that prompted its demise.

Popes, presidents, and markets

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope... But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody”, said the US political operator James Carville. Under capitalism, capitalists as well as workers are dominated by “the markets”, an entity constructed by humans but which then dominates us. Falling unemployment, for example, is regularly reported as “bad news for markets”. Fully-developed socialism means “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, with economic life consciously...

The name of the new world we aim for

The newspaper of the Owenites, the biggest socialist trend in Britain in the early 19th century, was titled The New Moral World . The weekly journal of the German Social Democratic Party in its great days was called New Times ; Antonio Gramsci’s paper in Turin after World War One, The New Order , after a one-off special, The Future City . Karl Marx was sceptical of blueprints. “The working class... have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree... They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant”...

The German October

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the decision by the Communist International to launch an armed uprising in Germany. The uprising, which took place in October that year, was a dismal failure. It also marked the final attempt by a Communist Party anywhere in Europe to come to power in the same way that the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. The uprising was not something the German working class needed or desired. The Weimar Republic, however imperfect, was a democracy. Workers could vote for the Communist Party or the Social Democrats or any other party they wanted. In the 1920 elections...

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