Issue 16
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:
- 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 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
- Setting the boundaries
- Moving into another GEAR
- The heavy hand of enforced unity
- 'Managing contradictions'
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]
By the South African Communist Party
[This is a working draft prepared by the leadership of the SACP and circulated on the internet.]
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.
- Difficulties for an alternative model
- Is it possible to pose an alternative?
- Politics not as the art of the possible, but as the art of making the impossible possible
- Changing the traditional vision of politics
- A political subject up to the new challenges
- Why the left can't do without a political organization
- Copying the Bolshevik model and the deviations it led to
- A political instrument to fit the new challenges
- Fitting its language to the new times
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.
[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
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,