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Articles

The Capitalist Chicken That’s ‘Come Home to Roost’: What Two Hundred Fifty Years Hath Bequeathed

August H. Nimtz
The commercialisation of the bicentennial a half-century ago pales in comparison to what’s already underway for the Trump administration’s semiquincentennial celebration. Self-interest on steroids, unapologetically—embarrassingly, perhaps, for those who subscribe to capitalism’s dog-eat-dog/I-got-mine-you-get-your ethic. The capitalist chicken now roosting in the White House itself.

The Artist who Took up Arms: Reclaiming the Marxist Vision of Bishnu Prasad Rabha

Suddhabrata Deb Roy
During his years as an underground Marxist guerilla, Rabha produced an impressive and original analyses of the potential Indian revolution from a Marxist perspective, which often remains unappreciated not only globally, but also in India.

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of Myanmar

Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
The question of Palestine in Myanmar is overdetermined by religious affiliation and communal ties. But it doesn’t have to be. There is another way of plotting the links, connections, parallels, and, indeed, solidarities that can and should bridge these two places so rarely brought together—by way of a clear set of ties that follow historical and material relations.

Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part Four)

Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss

PART FOUR

Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part Three)

Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss

PART THREE

Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part Two)

Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss
 If we wish to thoroughly criticise Rockhill’s approach, we must confront the historical legacy of Stalinism. Throughout Rockhill’s work, there is an uncritical adulation of “AES”, past and present alike. He presents the Soviet Union, China, and similar states as principled opponents of imperialism and steadfast champions of world revolution. For Rockhill, criticism of AES is not merely mistaken but practically verboten – tantamount to treason against the revolution, and, at times, indistinguishable from a CIA psyop. But this rose-coloured view of the Soviet Union, China, and related regimes obscures the repeated double-crossing of anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles by Stalinism itself. These historical facts cast serious doubt on the revolutionary credentials of “Marxism-Leninism”.

Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part One)

Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss
To properly address Rockhill’s claims requires not only a direct engagement with his book, but also the development of independent criticism of both Stalinism and the Frankfurt School from a standpoint distinct from these currents. This means analysing how the pessimism of the Frankfurt School emerged in relation to Stalinism, rather than in isolation from it.

On the Meaning of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’: Was the October Revolution a Bait-and-Switch Operation?

Lars T. Lih
All Power to the Soviets! (Vsia vlast sovetam!) is one of the most famous political slogans of all time. But what exactly did this slogan mean? What did the Bolsheviks say when they explained and defended the slogan to their mass audience? What meaning did the mass soviet constituency give to this slogan when they expressed their support?

Ten Years After Ellen Meiksins Wood: Reading Political Theory Under Historical Pressure

Berkay Koçak
Ten years on, what would it mean to read political thought as a record of struggle, not a museum of ideas?

Can the People Overthrow the Regime While the State Remains in Place? On the Central Dilemma of the Arab Uprisings

Gilbert Achcar
The future of the long-term revolutionary process that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and swept across the Arab region hinges on the ability of progressive forces to achieve a counter-hegemony within society, or to revive this counter-hegemony where it was previously achieved during the 2011 uprising before fading in the subsequent counter-revolution.

The Elephant in the Room – the Rising Historical Standard of Living of the Working Class

Mike Haynes

The point is so elementary it ought not to require a quotation from Engels or anyone else to establish it. But, since the argument here points in a direction that many on the Left do not want to go, let us go with Engels. ‘The condition of the working class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements at present … A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories …’. This is what he wrote in 1845 in his preface to his The Condition of the Working Class in England.[1]

Introduction to Dossier ‘Marx, MEGA and MEGA-Marx’

Kaan Kangal

Lenin once said: if you ditch Hegel, you derail Marx. This comes with a reminder: read your Marx or crash hard! But what to read in Marx, which Marx, when, and how? Reading Marx doubles, triples, quadruples as misreading, overreading, underreading, un-reading, Ur-reading Marx; as reading into Marx; as reading Marx into others; as reading Marx reading others. ‘Marx’ usually designates Marx and Engels as an intellectual unit and a political party; at other times, ‘Marx’ refers to a lone wolf apart from Engels. Engels, the ‘General’, for his part, inhabits several lives: Engels before Marx, alongside Marx shoulder-to-shoulder, and after Marx. Engels may have called himself a ‘second fiddle’ next to Marx, but he was more than a reader, editor and sponsor of Marx. He was a theoretician, tactician and adventurer in his own right. The two comrades in arms authored what fills their archives, and, by silence, what never made it in. Yet the fate of that legacy is scarcely theirs to decide alone.