Issue 16

September-December, 2000: What alternative to neo-liberalism?

Karl Marx: Before all else a revolutionary

By David Yaffe

The first short biography of Karl Marx could be said to have been produced by his great friend and collaborator Frederick Engels on March 17, 1883, in a speech heard by the ten other people gathered together in Highgate Cemetery for Marx's funeral. It offers very clear guidelines to those who would take it upon themselves to write future biographies. Marx, said Engels, was before all else a revolutionary:

Permanent Revolution today

By Phil Hearse

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 seeks collaboration with hold or tend towards the permanent revolution theory. These include the sections of the Fourth International, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Pakistani Labour Party, the NSSP in Sri Lanka, Solidarity

Debate and opposition within the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance since 1994

By Dale T. McKinley

The device by which content is replaced by form and ideas by phrases has produced a host of declamatory priests … whose last offshoots had of course to lead to democracy. Karl Marx[1]

Proposals For An International Left Platform

By the South African Communist Party

[This is a working draft prepared by the leadership of the SACP and circulated on the internet.]

Unfinished business: the struggle for abortion rights

By Kamala Emanuel

January, 2000 -- Why abortion rights? What is the importance of this issue? For us, it may be obvious, but it's necessary to reiterate the importance of the right to abortion because of the attacks it continues to face, and because in Australia and elsewhere a generation of women have now grown up with relatively straightforward access to abortion, who may not appreciate the significance of this right.

Making the Impossible Possible

By Marta Harnecker

In the final decades of the 20th century, we are living through an ultraconservative period. For historian and political analyst Immanuel Wallerstein, the historical crisis of the system is so profound that it will take many years at least two decades before a coherent strategy to fight the system can be developed.

Contemporary capitalism and the debate over the alternative

[This presentation was a contribution by the Cuban Communist Party delegation to the debate over the central document for the Ninth Meeting of the São Pãolo Forum, Managua, Nicaragua, February 19-21, 2000. Translation by Dick Nichols.]

Introduction

Throughout the 1990s theoretical analysis and the left's debate over strategy and tactics have been conditioned by two basic elements: in first place, the political and ideological impact of the collapse of the Soviet

Links 16: Editor's introduction

What alternative to neo-liberalism?

The spreading protests against a "globalisation" that represents the agenda of international big capital reflect, among other things, the discrediting of the ideology of neo-liberalism among ever widening sectors. Its program of privatisation, savage cutbacks to social welfare spending and the unfettered rule of the "free market" is increasingly exposed as having failed to deliver on its promises of improved living standards for the majority. Just the contrary: the sacrifices demanded by neo-liberalism,