Continuing Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal’s presentation of various positions in the debate within Argentina’s left around the rural crisis, we publish an exclusive translation of a recent article by Claudio Katz, an economist, researcher, professor and member of Economista de Izquierda (EDI -- Left Economists). Translated by Janet Duckworth. For previous articles on Argentina, go to http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/147

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A selection of thought-provoking articles by Michael A. Lebowitz from Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class and Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. He is a program coordinator with the Centro International Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.

Links Dossiers are in easy-to-print PDF format and readers are encouraged to print and distribute them.

Contents

Socialism is the future: Build it now!

The spectre of socialism for the 21st century

Discussion on ‘The spectre of socialism for the
21st century’

The capitalist workday, the socialist workday

Without workers’ management, there is no socialism

Reviewed by Ben Courtice

From Little Things Big Things Grow: strategies for building revolutionary socialist organisations, by Mick Armstrong, Socialist Alternative, 2007.

As official politics continues to move to the right, a growing gulf is opening up between the hopes and aspirations of millions of working people and the agenda of the ruling capitalist establishment and its parties… Much of the time that disenchantment and discontent finds no outlet, but then it explodes in massive mobilisations like those against the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, or the repeated giant rallies against Howard’s WorkChoices.[i]

Statement by Patria y Pueblo (Homeland and People), translated and introduced by Federico Fuentes for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

By Sergio Garcia, translated and introduced by Federico Fuentes for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

After more than 100 days of intense conflict between supporters and opponents of the Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner government in Argentina, centred on the conflict over the divisive move to increase taxes on exports of foodstuff such as soya and sunflower oil, Fernandez has been forced to put the resolution to debate in congress.

[This article first appeared in the Democratic Socialist Party's internal discussion bulletin The Activist - Volume 10, Number 9, October 2000.]

 

By Doug Lorimer

Last year I wrote a letter to Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, responding to his request for our leadership's disagreements with the Committee for a Workers' International's view of Cuba. The letter took the form of an extended polemic against Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) general secretary Peter Taaffe's 1982 pamphlet Cuba: Analysis of the Revolution. The letter was subsequently printed in The Activist for the information of DSP members. In June this year [2000] the CWI published a book by Peter Taaffe replying to my letter to Comrade Tariq entitled Cuba: Socialism and Democracy.

The following article was written at the request of Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, as an initial contribution to a discussion between the LPP and the DSP on the character of the leadership of the Cuban socialist state and the Communist Party of Cuba. It was published in the Volume 9, Number 4, 1999, edition of The Activist, the Democratic Socialist Party's internal discussion bulletin.

By Doug Lorimer

Following the March 11 decision by the Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner government to introduce a sliding tax increase – varying from 35% to 45% – on soya exports, Argentina has been rocked by a wave of protests by agricultural producers. For 21 days, the “countryside” – including the four organisations that unite large, middle and small agricultural producers – organised a rural lockout, blocking the circulation of agricultural produce to the cities. On April 1, one-hundred thousand government supporters

By Michael Shaik

By Malik Miah

Malik Miah is a member of the Editorial Board of Links and of the US socialist organisation Solidarity.

• Engels and Marx
• Lenin's view
• Lenin on the right of nations to self-determination
• What is self-determination?
• Nationalism of the oppressed
• Notes

In Links Number 13, Norm Dixon writes: "The struggle of oppressed nations for national liberation remains one of the most burning issues in the world today". And therefore "socialists need to understand the national question if they are to make sense of the world, provide leadership and correctly determine their attitude and response to many international events".

By Terry Townsend

By Norm Dixon

Norm Dixon is a member of the National Committee of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party and a journalist for Green Left Weekly.

By Doug Lorimer

• Transformation of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution
• Bolshevik policy and Two Tactics
• What is the socialist revolution?
• 'Logical contradiction' and Lenin's conception
• The democratic dictatorship: bourgeois republic or special form of proletarian dictatorship?
• The Commune state and the democratic dictatorship
• Phil Hearse's 'DSP theory'

Phil Hearse's polemic against my pamphlet proceeds from a fundamentally false assumption, i.e., that it "attempts [to give] a general strategic view" of revolution in "the semi-colonial and dependent semi-industrialised countries". He alleges that my pamphlet presents Lenin's policy of carrying out the proletarian revolution in semi-feudal Russia in two stages (a bourgeois democratic and then a socialist stage) "as a general schema for the 'Third World' today". Nowhere in the pamphlet do I make such a

By Phil Hearse

• The central strategic problem: class alliances in the dominated countries
• The Mexican example
• End of the semi-feudal aristocracy
• National and democratic tasks in the era of neo-liberal globalisation
• The DSP on Indonesia
• The debate inside the RSDLP
• Lorimer's concessions to permanent revolution
• Lenin: from 'bourgeois republic' to 'Commune state'
• Lessons of Spain
• Two-stage theory
• Weaknesses of the permanent revolution theory
• Underestimating the role of the proletariat, underestimating the role of the party

In the fight for socialist renewal, international collaboration cannot be on the basis of total agreement on theory, strategy or tactics. All or some of the members of organisations the Democratic Socialist Party

By Doug Lorimer

• Once again on the purpose of my pamphlet
• 'Two Tactics' and the bourgeois revolution
• The 'democratic dictatorship' and the bourgeois republic
• Lenin's and Trotsky's 'conceptions' of the revolution and 1905
• The October Revolution and 'permanent revolution'
• Once again: what is the socialist revolution?
• National oppression, national-democratic revolution and socialism
• Conclusion: what's wrong with 'permanent revolution'?

By Phil Hearse

• The DSP's position on revolutions in the dominated countries
• The socialist revolution, Russia and Spain
• Russia: how the revolution opened the way for capitalism and bourgeois rule (according to Lorimer)
• Spain
• Conclusion: agreement and differences between the DSP and permanent revolution

"The International of Crime and Treason [i.e., the counter-revolutionary coordination of imperialism—PH] has in fact been organised. On the other hand, the indigenous bourgeoisies have lost all their capacity to oppose imperialism—if they ever had it—and they have become the last card in the pack. There are no other alternatives: either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution."—Ernesto Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental 1967 (emphasis added).

By John Rees

CONTENTS

By Doug Lorimer

• 1921 Comintern resolution
• Public debate
• Party discipline
• Ideological heterogeneity
• Lenin's struggle for a Marxist party
• Notes

The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union opened an important debate within the Marxist movement about how to evaluate the history of the socialist movement, and especially of the Bolshevik Party, the party that led the world's first successful socialist revolution. One of the central aims of Links has been to provide a forum for such debate.

By Murray Smith

The Second International

Split and unity, 1905-06

The party reconstituted in 1912

Public debates

The Bolshevik faction

Debates in the Bolshevik Party

Bolshevik debates in 1917 and after

Breaches of discipline

Levi and the KPD

The Comintern

The withering away of Bolshevik democracy

By way of conclusion

Notes

 

I would like to make some comments on Doug Lorimer's article, "The Bolshevik Party and `Zinovievism': Comments on a Caricature of Leninism", published in Links 24.