This short essay written by karl korsch in 1950 and commonly known as the “Zürich theses” marks an important point within the development of the post-war communist milieu by virtue of its historic role as a reconfiguration of the Marxist dialectic and an assessment of weak practical and theoretical points […]
Stalinism
Left-Communist works against the Soviet Union and Stalinism
Why Russia Isn’t Socialist, PCInt
I. Russian Capitalism Conspicuous social divisions, wage differentials, privileges according to type of work, and a division of labour which dooms “manual workers” to the factory inferno and which reserves for intellectuals the monopoly of comfort, can these really be said to be compatible with Socialism as the CP men […]
Capitalism under the Red Banner: Seventy Years of the People’s Republic of China, ICT
Seventy years ago, on 1 October 1949, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao. Here we reproduce an article which originally appeared in Communist Review 8 (January 1990), published by the ICT (or IBRP as it was then) in the aftermath of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square […]
Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1844, Bordiga
Cornerstones of the communist programme At the closing sessions of the meetings in Turin and Parma (including the corollarii[1] in the report of the first meeting) we dealt with the basics of our party doctrine, which ties in with the negation of individualism and personality; something with which not only the […]
Mao’s China, Certified Copy of the Bourgeois Capitalist Society, Amadeo Bordiga
Mao Zedong, in a speech given at the Supreme State Council on February 27th 1957, confirmed item-by-item, the doctrinal deviations that put the Chinese “communism” completely out of Marxism. Chinese revisionism rises from the desperate effort to display as a transition phase to socialism a form of state and a […]
The Marxist Ideology in Russia, Karl Korsch
A 1938 article by the German Left-Communist Karl Korsch, in which he explains how Marxism is used as an ideological facade to hide Stalinism’s capitalist nature.
1922-3: The Communist Fractions Against the Rising Counter-Revolution, ICC
To the generation of revolutionaries which emerged from the resurgence of class struggles at the end of the 1960s, it was difficult enough to recognise the proletarian character of the October 1917 insurrection and the Bolshevik party which provided its political leadership. The trauma of the Stalinist counter-revolution had produced, […]
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
Debord’s 1967 work of analysis of culture under capitalism, and criticism of previous Marxists – positing that they functioned as part of the same spectacle of capitalism.
Against Grover Furr, Against Stalinism, John
A short piece written against the Stalinist historian Grover Furr.
Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil, Amadeo Bordiga
A 1951 text arguing for the existence of a capitalist class in the Soviet Union, in the form of the state.