Wed 13, January 2010 @ 17:31
The transformation of the USSR into a capitalist state, which
Tony Cliff asserted took place after the first five year plan in
1928, posed a problem for what had been the accepted Marxist theory
of the state until then. Trotsky writing in 1934 had argued that
the film of reformism cannot be run backwards or in other words
that capitalism could not be restored peacefully in the USSR.
According to Cliff when Trotsky wrote that sentence capitalism had
already been restored six years previously only no one had noticed
Cliff says...writes Bill Jefferies
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Wed 13, January 2010 @ 17:24
Chris Harman was a leading theorist of the International
Socialist (IS) tradition from the late 1960s on. In as much as
anyone did he both developed and defended the theory of state
capitalism.....writes Bill Jefferies
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Wed 13, January 2010 @ 17:17
Chris Harman in the acknowledgments to his book “Class
Struggles in Eastern Europe”, credits the principle contributors to
the theory of state capitalism as Tony Cliff, Mike Kidron and Nigel
Harris. Before considering Harman's own distinctive contribution to
the theory it is worth assessing their impact on it...writes Bill
Jefferies....
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Wed 13, January 2010 @ 17:12
Cliff claims that the expropriation of the peasantry, the forced
collectivisation of the first five year plan was the creation of
capitalism, he says, “The expropriation of the means of production
from the peasantry,” created capitalism in the countryside. The New
Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by the Bolshevik Party in 1921,
replaced the forced extraction of agricultural surplus by
collection agencies, with a tax. Peasants were allowed and indeed
encouraged to produce an agricultural surplus for sale on the
domestic market this surplus was then taxed.....writes Bill
Jefferies...
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Wed 13, January 2010 @ 17:05
The collapse of the “Communist bloc”, the USSR, Central and
Eastern Europe and China, between 1989-1991 created a new period of
capitalist development, globalisation. The integration of these
states into the world market has fundamentally transformed the
nature of capitalist development in the two decades since. Yet
within Marxism itself, a school of theory which rests fundamentally
on the distinction between different modes of production, on the
relationship between the economic base on the political
superstructure, the impact of the transformation of these former
centrally planned economies into capitalist ones has been
systematically underestimated....writes Bill Jefferies....
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Mon 06, August 2007 @ 15:18
Chris Harman writing in International Socialism 115 (ISJ 115) says that as;
“Most of the left held a confused belief that these (the Stalinist centrally planned economies – BJ) were “socialist” states. This prevented many commentators from understanding that these states collapsed because the rate of profit was no longer high enough to cover their cost of equipping themselves for international competition....writes Bill Jefferies....
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Thu 24, August 2006 @ 22:45
Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), the leader of the Socialist Workers Party, died on 9 April 2000. He was one of the most significant leaders of the post-war British left. He was born in May 1917 in Palestine. He rejected Zionism and Stalinism and threw himself into building the Trotskyist Fourth International.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:17
Conflicts between imperialism and petit bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist led forces in the semi-colonial world have peppered the post-war era. From Korea in the 1950s through to Afghanistan in the 1980s revolutionaries have had to declare which side they were on. Here, Dave Hunt asks this question of the SWP and its forerunners.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:15
It might at first sight seem curious to accuse the Socialist Workers Party of syndicalism. After all is it not a party? But Colin Lloyd argues that in fact the SWP has a thoroughly syndicalist notion of the rank and file movement and the struggle' for union democracy.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:14
Many members of the Socialist Workers Party have heard their organisation accused of "economism". But what does it mean exactly? Clare Heath looks at the origin of this term in Lenin's polemics at the turn of the century and finds that it is an accurate label for the SWP's approach to struggles as diverse as the strike against Heath's Tory government in the 1970s to the Poll Tax battle of the late 1980s and early 1990s
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:13
The Socialist Workers Party has always made a point of distancing itself from "orthodox Trotskyism". Rather than describe itself as a Trotskyist organisation it claims merely to stand in the tradition of Trotsky or to "stem from" Trotskyism. Arthur Merton examines this claim.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:11
ONE STICK that SWP members repeatedly beat the rest of the left with is that they alone are "building the party". Every week in Socialist Worker a column records the week's new recruits and urges more to join the revolutionary party.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:11
Cliff wrongly argued that the subordination of consumption to the accumulation of the means of production was ipso facto a capitalist task. The implications of this is that in societies where precapitalist modes of production dominate, or where capitalism is weak, a stage of private or state capitalism is inevitable, unless a revolution in such a country is accompanied by other revolutions in the advanced capitalist world.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:09
SWP members will always defend their state capitalist theory as the one that is least tainted with reformist perspectives in the Stalinist states. The upheavals in Poland throughout the 1980s enable us to demonstrate the political logic of state capitalism. Here in two articles on Poland, during 1980-81 and 1989 respectively, we show that the SWP cannot face up to, let alone answer, any of the key questions raised by the struggle for power against the Stalinist ruling caste.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:09
Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism lies at the very centre of the Socialist Workers Party's politics. Since 1950 Cliff's tendency has defined itself against others on the international left mainly over the argument that the USSR, China and Eastern Europe are "state capitalist" societies.
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:07
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), one of the largest groups on the British left, began the 1990s in an optimistic mood. With Thatcher in trouble over the Poll Tax the party decided it was time to "go for growth".
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Wed 09, August 2006 @ 16:01
Lesley Day analyses the political differences behind the recent splits in the SWP (Britain) and its sister organisations worldwide. The First half of the 1990s saw the rapid growth of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain and its sister organisations worldwide, grouped in the International Socialist Organisation (ISO).
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