debate
Royal Society’s tunnel vision on population and poverty
People and the Planet
Royal Society Science Policy Centre Report
April 2012
Review by Ian Angus
May 23, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the Ian Angus' permission -- The radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once compared populationism to a phoenix, the mythical bird that periodically burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. No matter how often the “too many people” argument is refuted, it always returns, making the same claim that people are breeding too much and consuming too much, devouring the Earth like a plague of locusts.[1]
Lars Lih: How Lenin's party became (Bolshevik)
By Lars T. Lih
Debate: Neoliberalism in disguise in Bolivia?
Location of the indigenous territory and national park known as TIPNIS.
The Lenin wars: Over a Cliff with Lars Lih
Nadezhda Krupskaya and Lenin wi
Lars Lih: Falling out over a Cliff
Click HERE to follow the entire debate on Tony Cliff's Lenin. For more discussion on revolutionary organisation, click HERE.More articles by Lars Lih are available at http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/500.
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Remarks on the 1905 Congress and the 1912 conference of the Russian Social Democratic Worker Party (RSDWP)
By Lars T. Lih
Paul Le Blanc: Revolutionary organisation and the ‘Occupy moment’
Occupy Pittsburgh, October 15, 2011.
Paul D’Amato: The mangling of Tony Cliff
Boris Kustodiev's 1920 painting "Bolshevik".
[Click HERE to follow the debate on Tony Cliff's Lenin. For more discussion on Lenin, click HERE. For more discussion on revolutionary organisation, click HERE.]
By Paul D’Amato
February 4, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Pham Binh’s criticism of the late British Marxist Tony Cliff’s Lenin: Building the Party (“Mangling the Party”), published in the Australian journal Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, is substantially wrong on many points; but its chief defect is that it is a hatchet job.
Five points in response to Pham Binh
By Paul Le Blanc
"The creation of healthy, democratic and cohesive revolutionary organisations on the Leninist model is both possible and necessary, in my opinion."
February 1, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- I am sorry that Pham Binh has chosen to respond in the way that he has to my criticism of his article ("Mangling the party: Tony Cliff's Lenin"). I will make only a few comments here to help clear up misunderstandings.
1. My critical comment about Pham’s article not providing us with anything useful for those engaged in today’s struggles was not a judgment about him as a person or about all things that he may have written about the Occupy movement or anything else. A substantial review article having to do with building the revolutionary party, however, should contain (in my opinion) something of value for those of us who are committed to such things.
Paul Le Blanc’s defence of Tony Cliff’s ‘Building the Party’ – Pham Binh replies
By Pham Binh
[Read Paul le Blanc's response HERE.]
January 31, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- When I discovered that Paul Le Blanc had responded to my review of Tony Cliff’s Building the Party I was hoping for the scholarly and thorough approach he used in writing his book Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. What I found was quite the opposite.
Le Blanc begins his response by claiming that my book review’s “obvious purpose is to persuade the reader that Tony Cliff’s book is little more than a mass of ‘egregious misrepresentations’ and ‘has so many gross factual and political errors that it is useless as a historical study of Lenin’s actions and thoughts.’ This is a demolition job. It doesn’t offer much that we can use and build on as we face the challenges of today and tomorrow.”
I drew my conclusions about Cliff’s book only after I closely studied what Lenin said and did and compared it to what Cliff claimed Lenin said and did. The more I studied, the more striking the divergences became.