Thursday, January 23, 2020

Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics, 2018
James Muldoon
The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019
James Muldoon
A Marxian Theory of Democracy
Socialism and Democracy, 2000
Mehmet Tabak
https://www.academia.edu/3061865/A_Marxian_Theory_of_Democracy


Marx's Theory of Proletarian Dictatorship Revisited
Author(s): Mehmet TabakSource:
Science & Society,
Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 333-356
Published by: Guilford Press
2018
Binay  Sarkar

THE LABOUR DEBATE AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE THEORY AND REALITY OF CAPITALIST WORK

https://www.academia.edu/3190057/The_Labour_Debate._An_investigation_into_the_theory_and_reality_of_capitalist_work

What is to be Done? Leninism,anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today

 
What is to be Done? Leninism,anti-Leninist Marxism and theQuestion of Revolution today
 
Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler
I
Of one thing we can be certain. The ideologies of the twentiethcentury will disappear completely. This has been a lousy century.It has been filled with dogmas, dogmas that one after anotherhave cost us time, suffering, and much injustice (Garcia Marquez,1990).
Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across theglobe, the centenary of Lenin’s
What is to be Done?
in 2002has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves bitter taste of revolution whoseheroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference toLeninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing isthe contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. Whatdoes anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of anti-globalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalismand what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails toespouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation?Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradictionin terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice ofrevolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionaryorganization in the form of the party, and its idea of the statewhose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution,remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, nowappearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. OrthodoxMarxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the
 
2
What is to be Done?
 
class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization,seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionallyto the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’(see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment andmanagement in the form of abstract equality. The denial ofhumanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequalityin property to relations of abstract equality in the form ofexchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception ofthe workers state, where everybody is treated equally as aneconomic resource.Hiding behind dogma, contemporary endorsements of therevolutionary party as the organizational form of revolution,focus the ‘distortion’ of socialism on Stalin, cleansingLeninism and maintaining its myth.
1
 Was the tragedy of theRussian revolution really just contingent on the question ofleadership, a tragedy caused by a bad leader who took overfrom a good leader, and should Trotsky had succeeded Lenin,would his leadership have been ‘good’, rescuing the revolutionfrom the dungeons of despair – the Gulag? Whateverdifference Trotsky might have made, is revolution really just aquestion of personalities and their leadership qualities?Orthodox accounts do not raise the most basic question of thecritical Enlightenment –
cui bono
 (who benefits) – and,instead, show great trust in the belief that revolution has to bemade on behalf of the dependent masses, so that all goesaccording to plan, including the planning of the economicresource labour through the workers state. Marx’s insight thatcommunism is a classless society and that ‘to be a productivelabourer is...not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (Marx, 1983, p.477), is endorsed in perverted form: the party’s directorshipover the proletariat is a fortune for the misfortunate. Thosewho take the project of human emancipation seriously, willfind little comfort in the idea that the party knows best.Contemporary anti-capitalism does well to keep well clear ofthe Leninist conception of revolution. However, itsindifference to revolution belies its anti-capitalist stance. This,then, means that the
ratio emancipationis
 has to berediscovere
Outlining a vision of Communism in 21st century as an alternative to Capitalism
(by PKD (Parivartan ki Disha), Nagpur,India)
 ‘Humanity …..chooses its present from the perspective of the future, and thus forms its present on the basis of a projected future.’
The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2016) 750 pp. $35.00
REVIEWED BY Peter C. Caldwell
“The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth”. So concludes Stedman Jones’ monumental new biography
of Karl Marx. In part, he is making a specific point, familiar to those who followed the debates among Marxists of the 1960s through 1980s: Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and others constructed the Marxism of the Second International, a closed doctrine of social development that could not encompass Marx’s own intellectual surprises. Stedman Jones is also making an argument about intellectual history, which he conceptualizes as the careful contextualization of ideas. Patterns of radical thinking, the content of radical movements, and the events of radical politics
dominate his account of Marx’s intellectual development rather than, for example, the social structure and cultural norms of the educated bourgeoisie stressed in Sperber’s recent biography.
‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union 
History of Economics Review
M.C. Howard and J.E. King*
 Introduction 
The aim of this paper is to explore the reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of one group of critics from the left: those who saw it as ushering in a new form of capitalism. The controversy over state capitalism had both theoretical and practical significance. At the analytical level it presented an important test of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, which had been formulated in a largely successful attempt to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe but had encountered difficulties when applied to other epochs and other continents. In political terms, the class character of the Soviet Union was a crucial question for those who wished to understand its internal dynamics, the nature of its contradictions and the potential that it offered for revolutionary change. It remained central, even after 1991, to any serious Marxian analysis of post-Mao China, though this is not a topic that we develop at any length here. 
Proletarian Dictator in a Peasant Land:Stalin as Ruler 
Ronald Grigor Suny 
Alex .Manoogian !Professor of .Modern Armenian History 
The University of Michigan
 A,-paper,.prepared for the conference on , 
20th Century Russia - Germany in Comparative Perspective
 September 19-22, 1991 University of Pennsylvania

Any revolution from above is inevitably
revolution by dictatorship and despotism.
(Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1849)