The US Civil War was a major influence on the development of Marxism. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the war against chattel slavery was an important phase in the global struggle against human bondage. Their commentary on the war is compiled in The Civil War in the United States, an essential volume for those seeking a Marxist understanding of the most pivotal conflict in US history, as well as the relationship between oppression and labor.
National Bolshevism originated during a brief, disastrous moment in the 1920s when the German Communist Party attempted to appeal to working-class Nazi supporters with nationalist or even anti-semitic rhetoric. As Marxist historian Doug Enaa Greene shows, this shameful chapter still resonates today. Marxists should never be tempted to set aside our internationalism or anti-oppression principles in hopes of reaching the most backward workers.
The upcoming US presidential election is once again provoking arguments from liberals about the “lesser evil” amid widespread concern about the reactionary right. Revolutionary socialists never support capitalist parties or their candidates — our class enemies — and we reject lesser-evilism as a justification for doing so, even when the “lesser” evil isn’t complicit in genocide. Here, we outline the history of this fundamental Marxist principle.
The Black Antifascist Tradition, by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen, is an extensive overview of the politics of anti-racist struggles by Black people in the United States. Published earlier this year by Haymarket Books, it is, first of all, a very interesting and...
Karl Kautsky’s grandson John told a very revealing anecdote about attitudes towards his grandfather in the 1960s. He recalled a historian named Georges Haupt, who had many discussions among students about the history of the Second International. During those talks,...
In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the...
According to the dominant view on the broad liberal-left, to achieve progressive change we must elect officials with progressive politics. Liberalism claims we can eliminate the problems inherent in capitalism without eliminating capitalism itself, and by using the...
Marxism represents a complete and vigorously materialistic world-view. A complete world-view differs from an eclectic one in that each of its aspects is connected in the closest way with all the others, and therefore one cannot with impunity eliminate one of them and...
“We don’t have a mass revolutionary party. If we did, I would join. Once upon a time, a revolutionary vanguard existed. After the defeat of the New Left, the vanguard has to be rebuilt. We need to knit together activists. Without soviets there would have been no...
I want to start off by admitting that I am totally what you might call a “basic girl.” I love overpriced oat milk lattes, and going to Target as a form of therapy. For the past two years in a row, I was in the top .03% of Taylor Swift listeners on Spotify. It’s a...
Earlier this month, I attended Socialist Alternative’s Socialism conference in Sydney. For readers outside Australia, I’m referring to the Australian Trotskyist organization (which was a cousin of sorts to the ISO in the US before the latter disbanded), and not the...
The anti-racist and anti-police brutality movement has turned toward abolitionism in recent years. It has called for the complete elimination of police and prisons. This is a radical turn and to be applauded, but it does have its problems. One of the key arguments for...
What kind of party do we need? Or what kind of party should revolutionary socialists be focused on building? I want to propose some answers to the organizational questions we’re facing. But more than that, I want to invite those who are asking the same questions to...
A specter is haunting communism: the specter of “socialism” Reformists and Stalinists, social democrats and communists alike have invented “socialism” as a replacement for Karl Marx’s revolutionary communism. They try to divert the left-wing movement from its goal of...
“A supporter of the theory of scientific communism does not take anything on word. He judges everything by reason and experience…. Bureaucratic and artificial discipline has crumbled to dust at the moment of danger. Revolutionary discipline does not exclude but...
The authentic Marxist tradition has always stressed that democracy is fundamental to socialism. Marx defined socialism as the “self-emancipation of the working class.” In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels said that the first step on the road to socialism and then...
Sharp divisions among revolutionary socialists The question of war has always been a key division among socialists. It divides reformist supporters of the capitalist state from revolutionary opponents of the capitalist state. Since the late 1800s, it has divided soft...