An explanation of classical Marxism, followed by an explanation of the general term ‘Marxism.’
What Is Marxism?
Category: Featured
Wages, productivity and the rate of exploitation: Some concrete examples
Michael Pröbsting 1 August, 2023 First published at TheCommunists.net. The latest edition of the ILO’s Global Wage Report contains a number of interesting figures which demonstrate how the bosses are offloading the consequences of the capitalist crisis on the shoulders of the working class. The study shows, among others, that the real wages are more or less stagnating while the capitalists force the workers to produce more and more commodities. [1] Karl Marx explained in Capital Vol. 1 that the working day of a worker can basically be divided in two parts. One portion which he…
Venezuela: Politics of the commons — The open-ended history of communes
Reinaldo Iturriza López 10 August, 2023 First published at Venezuela Analysis. The history of the Communes is the history of the organization of the working class. But not the working class in an abstract sense, but that of the really existing one in a specific historical moment. Both the available documentary record and the testimony of organizers allow us to conclude that Hugo Chávez, and certainly the most astute members of the Bolivarian movement, fully understood the need, to unite and organize, to interpellate and be interpellated by what Chávez then referred to…
Twenty-first century imperialism, multipolarity and capitalism’s ‘final crisis’
John Smith & Federico Fuentes 1 August, 2023 As the author of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, which won the first Paul A. Baran—Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, few have spent as much time as John Smith thinking through the realities of global imperialism today. Smith has been an oil rig worker, bus driver, and telecommunications engineer. He is now a researcher and writer, as well as a longtime activist in the anti-war and…
Film – “LET’S RENT A TRAIN!”
Life in the Toronto Branch of the League for Socialist Action, 1961-1977 Click on picture below to see the Film “LET’S RENT A TRAIN!” is an unprecedented, 93-minute historical film documenting the rise and fall of a revolutionary political group whose youthful members waged campaigns that profoundly altered Canada’s political landscape. During the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, as members of the League for Socialist Action (LSA), several hundred highly disciplined activists led Canada’s antiwar movement against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and exposed Ottawa’s financial and diplomatic complicity…
You are not alone – the quest for solidarity
By ROAPE – July 25, 2023 ROAPE contributor, Yusuf Serunkuma, reviews a new book on the loneliness of the left. Left Alone is a highly original collection of urgent stories, reflections and short essays from around the world on the lived experiences of left loneliness from a variety of genres and left political currents. Serunkuma praises a volume that capture struggles in the trenches of authoritarianism, and on the streets of the capitalist world. By Yusuf Serunkuma In all struggles—before mass consciousness and awakening—strugglers, fighters, resistors or peasant/organic intellectuals have…
Shocks within the Imperialist System and the Tasks of Revolutionary Communists
June 5, 2023 The transformations of the imperialist system since the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of China, the wars in the Balkans, then in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the civil wars and sometimes genocidal wars as in Rwanda, the major world economic crises which occur almost every ten years, then the pandemic and its consequences, all reveal a profound reorganization of the economic structures of capitalism as well as a reconfiguration of social classes and inter-imperialist relations of power on an international scale. The reactions, uprisings, and…
Why are the Summits between China and the US “multiplying” ?
By La Marx International In the last 7 months the “summits” between the United States and China have multiplied. After years without official meetings between the two governments, suddenly in recent months the meetings have become recurring, and frantic. Visits by high-ranking officials of the United States government to China are permanent, or meetings between the governments of China and the US, whether bilateral, as well as at the G20 or Davos world summits. From 7 months ago there was a long Summit of the governments of Joe Biden, and…
Communal socialism in Venezuela
Venezuelan communes—where productive activities are controlled by a range of community assemblies—are fascinating examples of socialist forces experimenting with the creation of new social forms. Venezuela’s communes are an attempt to address some of the shortcomings of cooperatives and state-owned socialist factories by addressing not just economic production but other social relationships like parenting and gender relations at the grassroots level. Chris Gilbert, author of the forthcoming book Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project and co-author (with Cira Pascual Marquina) of Venezuela, the Present as Struggle,…
(1852) Frederick Douglass, “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July”
Frederick Douglass, ca. 1852 Daguerreotype photo by Samuel J. Miller Posted on January 24, 2007 _ Contributed by: BlackPast On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Whatever the expectations of his audience on that 76th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. Douglass’s speech appears below. Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could…