Karl Marx | Links

Marta Harnecker: Reading Marx's ‘Capital’ today – Lessons from Latin America

By Marta Harnecker, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

1. One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx published his book Capital, an intellectual effort of great breath, with the aim of revealing the logic of capitalist production and providing workers with theoretical instruments for their liberation. Having discovering the logic of the system, he was able to foresee with great anticipation much of what is happening in the world capitalist economy today. But, we cannot mechanically apply what is outlined in Capital to the current reality of Latin America.

Michael Lebowitz: If you don’t understand the second product, you understand nothing about Marx's Capital

Presentation by Michael A.

Marta Harnecker: 'Nobody can deny that a new revolutionary subject has been created in Venezuela'

January 27, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The following interview with Marta Harnecker was conducted by journalist Tassos Tsakiroglou for the Greek newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton prior to Harnecker's participation in the international conference "150 years Karl Marx's Capital: Reflections for the 21st Century", held in Athens, Greece, January 14-15, 2017. Links is making available the original English version of the interview.

Georgi Plekhanov and the roots of Soviet philosophy

By Jason Devine January 11, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– Marxism was born through a critical appropriation of Hegel’s method and a radical break with the philosophy of Young Hegelianism.[1] With this, Marx declared that philosophy was over. As he wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle in regards to the Hegelian dialectic, “This dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it by Hegel.”[2] Even more explicitly, Engels wrote in an early introduction to his Anti-Dühring: “The Hegelian system was the last and consummate form of philosophy, in so far as the latter is presented as a special science superior to every other. All philosophy collapsed with this system.”[3] Hence, any attempts to revive philosophy i.e. a specific form of ideology, could only be a step backwards from the advance made by Marx and Engels, could only ever be a reactionary project. If carried out within Marxism it can only mean a reversion back to pre-Marxist times, to pre-scientific views in the study of society. Dialectical materialism as the philosophy of Marxism is exactly such a reactionary turn. In fact, dialectical materialism, the ruling philosophy in the USSR, a philosophy which, in whole or in part, countless Marxist-Leninist parties, groups, and sects claim adherence to today, was essentially the product of Georgi Plekhanov. However, Plekhanov’s philosophy of dialectical materialism was not and is not synonymous with Marx’s method, with scientific socialism. Rather, the former can be more correctly described as neo-Young Hegelian.

What is socialism for the twenty-first century?

By Michael A. Lebowitz October 11, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — Often the best way to begin to understand something is to consider what it is not. Socialism for the twenty-first century is not a society in which people sell their ability to work and are directed from above by others whose goal is profits rather than the satisfaction of human needs. It is not a society where the owners of the means of production benefit by dividing workers and communities in order to drive down wages and intensify work—i.e., gain by increasing exploitation. Socialism for the twenty-first century, in short, is not capitalism.

The Communist Manifesto: A weapon of war

By Doug Enaa Greene September 16, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — With the exception of the Bible, no other work in history has been more praised and denounced, analyzed and criticized, both seriously and superficially, than the Communist Manifesto.

Engels as dickhead? Great novel, bad history

Mrs Engels
By Gavin McCrea
Melbourne: Scribe, 2015,
352 pages, A$29.99