A January 1960 text by Raya Dunayevskaya—”State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats“—has just been released by the Marxists Internet Archive. This article originally appeared in The Socialist Leader, the newspaper of the Independent Labour Party. Although long past its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, the ILP maintained a newspaper until it re-merged into the Labour […]
The New York Times Saturday Profile of December 3 features an interesting look at former Communist (PCI) and current president of Italy Giorgio Napolitano (“From Ceremonial Figure to Italy’s Quiet Power Broker“). While it may not be necessary to be reminded that Eurocommunism was essentially an euphemism for class collaboration, it is striking the degree […]
The Dialectics of State Capitalism: Writings on Marxist Theory, 1940-1956 Edited by Scott McLemee Haymarket Books, July 2012 Scott McLemee has been a literary champion of James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency period since the early 1990s and has edited two valuable collections of his writings, C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism (with Paul LeBlanc, 1994) and C.L.R. James […]
The Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has opened the C.L.R. James Papers to researchers. The acquisition of this material was announced in 2007 (although the exact provenance of the collection is not clear from the press release). A detailed finding aid on the collection is available online. Of particular interest is a manuscript […]
Historian Paul Buhle reminisces about the 1960s in the latest issue of Against the Current (“Memories of [my] Syndicalism“). Buhle, author of C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, describes his entry into the New Left via the oldest of the Old Left, the Socialist Labor Party. Buhle elsewhere (for example, in A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost, […]
Towards a New Manifesto Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Translated by Rodney Livingstone) Verso, 2011 Verso has released a text of a 1956 dialogue between Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno which was intended to result in a philosophical updating of the Communist Manifesto. The project is a worthy one, but neither thinker a) was stylistically […]
Ken Knabb, translator and author of Public Secrets, has released an enthusiastic statement (“The Awakening in America“) on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available the text of a 1947 letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to Natalia Sedova Trotsky, Russian revolutionary and widow of Leon Trotsky. Dunayevskaya served as Russian language secretary to Trotsky in 1937 and 1938 during the period of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry and became close to Natalia. The position […]
The HathiTrust Digital Library contains full-text scans of three Rosa Luxemburg classics. Two U.S. editions of the Junius pamphlet are available, as well as the first U.S. edition of her critique of the Russian revolution. The latter was translated by Bertram Wolfe and published in 1940 by Workers Age, the Lovestoneite publishing house. In addition, […]
Paresh Chattopadhyay, author of The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience, contributed a short piece to a recent issue of Economic and Political Weekly (published in Mumbai). Chattopadhyay criticizes an earlier piece by Markar Melkonian on the fate of socialism in the 20th century (“A Marxist Post-mortem of Soviet Socialism”, May 28, 2011). […]
Criticism &c. 