Direct Action Office Trades Hall basement

cnr Lygon & Victoria Sts Carlton (enter Victoria St).

By Doug Lorimer

[Talk presented to January RSP Marxism education conference.]

In a December 1915 introduction to Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin’s book Imperialism and World Economy, Lenin wrote:

“There had been an epoch of a comparatively ‘peaceful capitalism’, when it had overcome feudalism in the advanced countries of Europe and was in a position to develop comparatively tranquilly and harmoniously, ‘peacefully’ spreading over tremendous areas of still unoccupied lands, and of countries not yet finally drawn into the capitalist vortex. Of course, even in that epoch, marked approximately by the years 1871 and 1914, ‘peaceful’ capitalism created conditions of life that were very far from being really peaceful both in the military and in a general class sense. For nine-tenths of the population of the advanced countries, for hundreds of millions of peoples in the colonies and in the backward countries this epoch was not one of ‘peace’ but of oppression, tortures, horrors that seemed the more terrifying since they appeared to be without end. This epoch has gone forever. It has been followed by a new epoch, comparatively more impetuous, full of abrupt changes, catastrophes, conflicts, an epoch that no longer appears to the toiling masses as horror without end but is an end full of horrors.

From Monthly Review February 2010

Martin Hart-Landsberg

Martin Hart-Landsberg (marty@lclark.edu) teaches economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, and is the author with Paul Burkett of China and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

from IV Online magazine : IV420 - January 2010

Reflections of Fidel

The world half a century later

Rally talk at DSP educational conference, January 3-7, 1998

Perhaps around the Xmas dinner table this year, being quizzed by parents you haven’t seen for many months, or an aunt you haven’t seen for years, comrades have been met by a familiar refrain:

You’re a socialist? How could you be a socialist today?

How could you be a socialist after what happened in Russia? Isn’t socialism finished with now?

Or perhaps more regularly, as you’re arguing the point with a potential Green Left Weekly buyer, you get similar questions:

By John Percy

<!-- start main content --> <!-- begin content -->by Jim Percy

[This article is based on a report to a September 1984 plenum of the national committee of the Socialist Workers Party.]