Karl Marx

KARL MARX IN AUGUST (The Fall of Russian Stalinism)

KARL MARX IN AUGUST (To the tune of "Joe Hill") I dreamt I saw Karl Marx last night, I saw him standing there, His hair jet black, no longer white, Fierce eyes, with a bold young stare: His eyes had a young man's stare. I saw Marx youthful, angry there, I said in my surprise: "But you grew old, white beard and hair…" And then Marx cried: "All lies!" And then Marx cried: " - Damn lies!" "A ghost to comfort those who'd lost Their spark, themselves half dead: They made me old, grey with disgust - I'm young again!" he said, "I'm young again," he said. "Alive again! You see I'm back, My spirit...

Marx's major works on foreign trade

In his notes on the history of economic thought in 1861-63, first published as Theories of Surplus Value (but in fact the second draft of Capital, volume 1), Marx comments on the way a rich country can exploit a poorer one. He argued: “Say, in his notes to Ricardo’s book translated by Constancio, makes only one correct remark about foreign trade. Profit can also be made by cheating, one person gaining what the other loses. Loss and gain within a single country cancel each other out. But not so with trade between different countries. And even according to Ricardo’s theory, three days of labour...

Marx's telescope (part 3)

Part 1 here | Part 2 here Despite the Grundrisse being 150 years old, such ideas in it are, essentially, new for the left even today. The huge manuscript remained almost unknown for over a century. One fragment, a draft introduction, was published by Kautsky in 1903. The whole text was published in Moscow in 1939-40, but ignored in the tumult of war. Only three or four copies reached the West. A new edition (again, in the original German) was published in 1953, but again, little noticed. An English translation of excerpts on Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations was published by Eric Hobsbawm in...

Marx's telescope (part 2)

Part 1 here | Part 3 here The response is never automatic; the process is never linear. According to Marx in the Grundrisse, capital’s constant process of expanding human potentialities and simultaneously making human society more “empty” will always generate more than one response. The revolutionary communist response is to push forward, on through the whirl and out the other side, to emancipation. But, Marx insists, the “reactionary anti-capitalist response” will be there too, always, “to the blessed end”. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal...

Marx's telescope (part 1)

The working class is the revolutionary class. It is the gravedigger of capitalism and the architect of socialism. Everyone who has even heard of Karl Marx knows that those were central ideas. Part 2 here | Part 3 here But Marx himself, in old age, gave an eager suggestion from a young co-thinker about producing an edition of his collected works the wry response: “They would first have to be written”. Marx wrote a lot, but only a fraction of what he planned to write, and that fraction selected by haphazard circumstances as well as by deliberation. Thus, the Communist Manifesto opens with the...

The Lies Against Socialism Answered

For most of the 20th century, the common image of "socialism" was the USSR and the other states modelled on it, China, Cuba, and so on. There were always socialists who were critical of Stalin's or Khrushchev's USSR, seeing it as an unacceptably bureaucratic version of socialism, and keen to create a more democratic version in their own countries. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, a big majority even in the official Communist Parties was highly critical of Brezhnev's USSR. But most of those who criticised the USSR clung to the idea that some other USSR-model state - China, Vietnam, Cuba.... -...

Francis Wheen - disappointing on Das Kapital

I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s new book Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography, part of a series, “books that shook the world”. An extract was in Saturday’s Guardian

It's entertainingly written as you'd expect - like his biography of Marx - but weak on explaining the ideas of Capital.

Wheen argues...

The truth about Marxism and religion

By Paul Hampton Read this article in French here . An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were. The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in...

From the archive: Sicily and the Sicilians

This 1860 article by Karl Marx is a concise account of the struggles of the people of Sicily for freedom through centuries. So is the politics of it, in his last paragraph. Marx loathes the French emperor Napoleon III and says that he will do what he will do in Italy for dynastic and imperialist reasons. Marx nonetheless thinks that “any change” — even a French intervention in Sicily — “must be for the better”. Better than the ongoing slaughter of Sicilians by their own savage Bourbon government. Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from...

Marx and the “Marxist line” on war

Tom Unterrainer reviews Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume V: War and Revolution by Hal Draper This is the fifth volume of Hal Draper’s mammoth project to organise the political ideas developed by Marx and Engels on a coherent, closely argued and contextualised basis. It is something Marx managed for himself in his economic writing, but never with the diffuse array of journalism, essays and correspondence that constitutes his directly political writing. For Draper, this project wasn’t a mere academic exercise — though his lack of political activity during the period of writing leads some...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.