Blogs

The role of China in the imperialist pecking order has been covered many times on our website (leftcom.org). Here we deal with China’s evolution from a largely agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse which has also created the world’s largest working class – and what comes with that is, of course, simmering class conflict.

The article which follows was written at the beginning of the month when the continuing deforestation of the Amazon led to the yet more murders of the indigenous population. Since then the crisis has deepened as the dry season burning of the Amazon to clear the way for farming has reached new heights.

Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis. The previous obsession with the transformation problem has resulted in the undermining of these key aspects of Marx’s critique, actually making an understanding of twenty first century capitalism harder. Moseley’s book, though long winded and somewhat repetitive, serves a very useful purpose in exposing this undermining and its implications. For this reason alone it is worth reading.

The next few months will see the party political machines in full swing trying to draw us into the quagmire of democratic debate and that great privilege – a vote at the polling station. Neither of those arenas offer anything for the working class.

It did not take the fatal consequences of recent record temperatures in Western Europe, or the recent wildfires in California, monsoon floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh or the Mozambique cyclones, to tell us that something has radically shifted in the world’s climate. The existential threat of human-created climate change to life on the planet has been understood for decades. NASA, among others, first sounded the alarm about global carbon emissions in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed the same year.

Analysis of Brexit from an Anarcho-syndicalist, World Systems Analysis perspective arguing that both the EU and the British state must be opposed.

This edition of Revolutionary Perspectives goes to press at the same time as our English translation of Onorato Damen’s book Gramsci between Marxism and Idealism published after his death in 1979 (see leftcom.org or footnote 8 for how to purchase). By way of a taster we present an obituary which we translated from Prometeo.

Some thoughts on Kautsky, Jacobin magazine and the new Social Democratic current.

Part four of this article was written before the biggest financial crash was followed by the biggest banking bail-out in capitalism's history, yet it is interesting to see that essentially the same economic profile presents itself today.

The Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) and Klasbatalo are pleased to announce that from this point on Klasbatalo has become the Canadian affiliate of the ICT.

In 2010 the announcement by the Coalition government that university tuition fees would be tripled sparked a wave of student protest. Remaining largely within the confines of the campus, the movement exhausted itself and failed to spread to other sectors. Nine years later, what’s left?

critical analysis of Lenin's theory of imperialism

The rising tensions in the Persian Gulf in the past weeks can be easily attributed to a sharp crisis of overproduction in the international oil market, ongoing since 2014. One relevant theater for understanding recent developments therefore lies in the largely under-reported and often overlooked Libyan Civil War, and in particular in its wide-ranging implications for OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).

Part three of this series was published in 2005, two years or so before the great financial crash when the economic pundits were lauding the move away from manufacture to 'business and financial services'.

The article which follows is taken from the new edition of Revolutionary Perspectives (#14) which is just out. It was obviously written before the events which followed the British Navy’s seizure of the Iranian tanker, the Grace 1, off the coast of Gibraltar, but the substance of the analysis has not changed.

Capitalism is typically associated with ownership of firms by private persons while socialism is typically associated with their ownership by the government. However, state owned enterprises (which is the official name) vs private enterprises has very little to do with the actual mode of social labor, production, and distribution.

The first of a three-part critique of Extinction Rebellion, focussing on their attitudes towards the police, legal system and prison.

This second article in our series examines what is meant by ‘services’ and their apparently key role in the richest capitalist states where moving away from production of commodities is regarded as essential to economic advancement. Indeed, despite the setback of the 2007/8 financial crash, World Bank figures show that ‘services’ represent a higher proportion of GDP for the world economy as a whole. For the UK 77.4% of GDP was attributed to ‘services’ in 2018.