Aufheben

Last year, the threat of the Criminal Justice Bill galvanised thousands of people to take various forms of action against the state. It also brought very different oppositional elements together in a common practical relationship, many for the first time. In this issue, we examine the possibilities of these struggles.

[b]Part One: Sign of the Times

Introduction

Britain's first motorway opened in 1958 on a wave of auto-triumphalism. Motorways were presented as both an answer to 'the public's' transport requirements and an essential component of the modern infrastructure British capital needed to compete with its European counterparts.

In the second instalment of this, our radical soap-opera of theoretical controversy, we critically examine three important revolutionary currents that went beyond the objectivism of orthodox Marxism - Socialism or Barberism, the Situationist International, and the Italian autonomist current, as well as attempts to reassert the orthodox line.

The notion that capitalism must inevitably decline and, by implication, that history is on our side, has been a dominant idea that has shaped much marxist and revolutionary thought, particularly that of Trotskyists and left communists. In the wake of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc it has become more important than ever to challenge such notions of capitalist decline and decadence. In the first part of our critique we examine the development of the various theories of capitalist decline that emerged out of the collapse of the Second International up until the end of the Second World War.