Marxist Theory

First published: 27 May 2006

One of the effects of the quarter century of victories of international capitalism after 1979 was that it became significantly harder to obtain Marxist works. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 the Collected Works of Marx and Engels rose hugely in price and it took over a decade for the series to be completed. The Collected Works of Lenin disappeared and are expensive to acquire even second hand. Trotsky’s works went up significantly in price. The stream of publication and translation of lesser known Marxist writers that had appeared from the late 1960s onwards largely dried up.

First published: 24 May 2006

The most typical form of falsification in political argument is not actually to invent or falsify facts – although that, of course, is far from unknown. It is to rip individual facts out of context and to distort their weight  compared to other facts – not infrequently by entirely suppressing the latter. Or as Lenin noted in Statistics and Sociology: ‘The most widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of social phenomena is to tear out individual minor facts and juggle with examples.’

First published: July 1996

For more than a decade the most coherent support for the process of concentration and integration of capital in western Europe has been provided by social democracy. The rise, and recent decline, of this current – ‘Euro–socialism’ – provides an object lesson in the way in which the politics of the working class movement are shaped not merely by its own immediate situation, but by its relations with all classes in society.

First published: April 1996

Theoretical underdevelopment and the false counterposing of theory to practice has critically weakened the left in Britain. This majority British tradition has historically contrasted with the emphasis on the integration of theory and practice by the most advanced working class political currents internationally. The recomposition and renewal of the socialist left in Britain poses afresh the necessity of theoretical exchange and development.

First published: September 1993

Socialist Action gives tremendous emphasis to the international class struggle, the struggle of women, the black community, and all sections of the oppressed as part of working class politics. But it does not treat these simply as individual questions, vital as each is separately. Socialist Action seeks to integrate them in a hegemonic strategy – that is, one in which the labour movement champions the demands of all the exploited and oppressed. Such an emphasis is not a peripheral question but at the core of Marxism. We consider the origins of the idea of hegemony in the views of Marx and its place in socialist strategy.