How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory | Aeon Essays

Quantum dialectics - MR Online

The quantum revolution in physics played out over a period of 22 years, from 1905 to 1927. When it was done, the new theory of quantum mechanics had completely undermined the basis for our understanding of the material world. The familiar and intuitively appealing description of an atom as a tiny solar system, with electrons orbiting the […]

The Communist Manifesto

Without question one of the most significant books in modern history, The Communist Manifesto is a brief, populist pamphlet that distils the core ideas of Communism into accessible prose. Published just months before violent uprisings threatened to destabilise much of the European establishment, it outlines a view of history as a constant battle between the classes that will inevitably result in revolution. An ang...

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

[1] Written in Zurich in January-June 1916. Lenin began to take note of new developments in capitalism long before the outbreak of the First World War. In several of his writings from 1895 to 1913—”Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party” (1895-96); “The War in China” (1900); “The Lessons of the Crisis” (1901), “Review of Home Affairs” (1901); “Concentration of Production in Russia” (1912); “The Growth of Capitalist Wealth” (1913) “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia” (1913); “The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx” (1913); “Concerning Certain Speeches by Workers’ Deputies” (1912), and others—Lenin pointed out and analysed some characteristic aspects of the imperialist epoch— the concentration of production and the growth of monopoly; the export of capital; the struggle for new markets and spheres of influence; the internationalisation of economic relations; the parasitism and decay of capitalism; the growth of contradictions between labour and capital and the sharpening of the class struggle; and the creation of the material conditions for the transition to socialism. He devoted special attention to exposing predatory colonial policy, the fight for a division and redivision of the world, and the preparation of imperialist wars of aggrandisement. In his article, “Marxism and Revisionism”, written in 1908, he came out against the attempts to revise Marxism and undermine it from inside under the pretext of amending and correcting the theory in particular, Marx’s theory of crises. Lenin wrote: ‘The forms, the sequence, the picture of particular crises changed, but crises remained an inevitable component of the capitalist system. While uniting production, the cartels and trusts at the same time and in a way that was obvious to all, aggravated the anarchy of production, the insecurity of existence of the proletariat and the oppression of capital, thereby intensifying class antagonisms to an unprecedented degree. That capitalism is heading for a breakdown—in the sense both of individual political and economic crises and of the complete collapse of the entire capitalist system— has been made particularly clear, and on a particularly large scale, precisely by the new giant trusts” (see present edition, Vol. 15, pp. 35-36). Lenin kept abreast of all the latest writings on capitalism, as will be seen from his review of Hobson’s The Evolution of Modern Capitalism. In August 1904, Lenin began a translation of Hobson’s Imperialism, the manuscript of which has not yet been found. It was on the outbreak of the First World War that Lenin undertook a comprehensive study of the monopoly stage of capitalist development This was required by the working-class revolutionary struggle in Russia and other capitalist countries. In order to provide correct leadership for the revolutionary movement and combat the ideology of imperialist reaction and the reformist policy of conciliation with imperialists, it was necessary to see one’s way in the key economic question without a study of which there was no understanding of the assessment of modern war or modern politics, namely: the economic essence of imperialism”. Lenin must have started his close study of the writings on imperialism in mid-1915, when he was in Berne, for his first indexes of literature, plans, extracts, notes and summaries date to that period. The preparatory materials for Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Notebooks on Imperialism) make up about 800 printed pages. They contain extracts from 148 books (including 106 in German, 23 in French, 17 in English, and 2 translations into Russian), and 232 articles (of them 206 in German, 13 in French, and 3 in English) from 49 periodicals (34 German, 7 French and 8 English). In early January 1916, Lenin accepted an order for a book on imperialism from the legal Parus Publishers, founded in Petrograd in December 1915. Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky on December 29, 1915 (January 11, 1916): “I am getting down to the writing of a pamphlet on imperialism” (see present edition, Vol. 35). In the early part of February 1916, he left Berne for Zurich, where he continued to collect and work on materials on imperialism. He worked at the Zurich Cantonal Library and ordered books from other towns. On June 19 (July 2), 1916 Lenin wrote to M. N. Pokrovsky, who was then living in France and editing for Parus a series of pamphlets about West-European countries during the First World War: “Today, I sent you a manuscript by registered mail” (see present edition, Vol. 35). The manuscript, which was mailed with the letter, did not reach Pokrovsky, and another copy had to be sent. Besides, the publishers suggested that the finished manuscript should be shortened from eighty to fifty pages, but Lenin objected because “it is absolutely impossible to cut it down once again and squeeze it into fifty pages” (ibid.). When the book reached the publishers, Menshevik elements among the management deleted from the book parts sharply criticising Kautsky and Martov, and made corrections in the text which not only distorted Lenin’s style but also his ideas. Thus, Lenin’s terms pererastaniye (capitalism growing into imperialism) was altered to prevrashcheniye (transformation); reaktstonny kharakter (reactionary nature of the theory of ultra-imperialism) to otstaly kharakter (backward character), etc. In mid-1917, the book was published under the title Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism(A Popular Outline) with a preface by Lenin, dated April 26, 1917.

The Formation and Evolution of the Soviet Union’s Oil and Gas Dependence

Between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union’s economy was one of the most vibrant in the world. The country had successfully launched the first man into space and was competing with the United States in developing cutting-edge military technology. However, by the end of the 1980s, the economy was in a miserable state.

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - Carole Boyce Davies | Are.na

doi.org/10.1215/9780822390329

The Triumph of Broken Promises — Harvard University Press

A powerful case that the economic shocks of the 1970s hastened both the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism by forcing governments to impose austerity on their own people.Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge.Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy.

Lenin und seine Imperialismus-Broschüre – Kommunistische Organisation

Paul Oswald setzt sich im folgenden Beitrag mit Teilen des Quellenmaterials von Lenins Imperialismus-Broschüre auseinander. Anhand eines vergleichenden Blicks zwischen Lenins Broschüre und vorangegangenen theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen innerhalb der Arbeiterbewegung sowie der bürgerlichen Wissenschaft wird das Alleinstellungsmerkmal von Lenins Untersuchung herausgearbeitet. Durch diesen Vergleich wird insbesondere Lenins Entwicklung des Begriffs des Imperialismus aufgezeigt und damit ein Zugang zur Imperialismus-Broschüre eröffnet wird, der in der Debatte unterrepräsentiert ist.

‘Shut up and calculate’ does a disservice to quantum mechanics | Aeon Essays

The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice

Cyber-Marx

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism | Mediations | Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

Benjamin Noys examines the “substance” of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in order to argue that the text serves more than a diagnostic function in our…

They Came From a Communist Planet

A socialist parable of greed, aliens, and riots.

Spirits and the incompleteness of physics

Complexity, renormalization, and the spirits beyond the horizon of theory

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Dep…

Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized an…

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Traditio…

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric…

Capitalist Realism and the Eviction of Culture: Notes from Ljubljana

I’d like to thank everyone who came out to Nova pošta last Thursday evening to my lecture on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, recently translated into Slovenian by Pika Golob and Nina …