With the development of the revolutionary process in Bolivia and Venezuela, and the sharp left debates and divisions on overall strategy in countries like Brazil, France and Italy, the issue of revolutionary strategy is coming back on the agenda.
The Challenge of Revolutionary Democracy in the Life and Thought of Rosa Luxemburg
23 September 2006, byTalk presented March 21 at an International Conference - organized under the name “Rosa Luxemburg’s Thought and Its Contemporary Value” - at Wuhan University by the School of Philosophy and The Institute of Marxist Philosophy in the People’s Republic of China March 20-22, 2006.
Uneven and Combined Development and the Sweep of History: Focus on Europe
21 September 2006, byAn important conceptual tool for responding to such dynamics is the theory of uneven and combined development formulated by Leon Trotsky as a contribution to the rich body of Marxist analysis.
Dialectics and Revolution
11 September 2006, byThere seems to exist an intimate link between the dialectical method and revolutionary theory: not by chance, the high period of revolutionary thinking in the XXth century, the years 1905-1925, are also those of some of the most interesting attemps to use the hegelo-marxist dialectics as an instrument of knowledge and action. Let me try to illustrate the connexion between dialectics and revolution in the thought of three distinct Marxist figures : Leon D. Trotsky, Vladimir I. Lenin and György Lukacs.
The Marxism of Trotsky’s "Results and Prospects"
9 September 2006, byTrotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, as sketched for the first time in his essay Results and Prospects (1906), was one of the most astonishing political breakthroughs in Marxist thinking at the begining of the XXth century.
Marx, Weber and the Critique of Capitalism
31 August 2006, byDespite their undeniable differences, Marx and Weber have much in common in their appraisals of modern capitalism: they share a vision of the capitalist economic system as a universe where “individuals are directed by abstractions,” (Marx), where impersonal relations and objects [Versachlicht] replace personal relations of dependence, and where the accumulation of capital becomes an end in itself and, by and large, irrational.
Ernest Mandel and the Marxian Theory of Bureaucracy
26 July 2005, byThe emergence and growth of bureaucracy over the last two hundred years has been the subject of considerable discussion among social scientists. Ernest Mandel’s work provides a powerful Marxian alternative to the Stalinist, social-democratic and bourgeois theories that deny the possibility of democratically organized workers’ struggles.
Lessons from a Critical Intellectual
19 January 2005, byLidia Cirillo reflects on nearly 40 years fighting for revolutionary marxism in Italy alongside Livio Maitan. She discusses the victories and defeats of the Italian Fourth International section, and the strengths of Maitan’s political vision which historically justified his work, even while he was apparently ’on the margins’.