The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Opportunism


Book Description

The second part of the book series, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, deals with the essential variants of bourgeois ideology since the reorganization of international capitalist production in the 1990s. In view of the growing capitalist crisis chaos and a widespread ideological disorientation, the emphasis in this second part is on the critique of the most important opportunist currents of the present day. Opportunism seeks to dissuade the working-class and people's movements from class struggle and scientific socialism. It exerts a harmful influence on parts of the international revolutionary and working-class movement. Every politically thinking, responsibly acting person must ask themselves today where they stand in regard to the globe-spanning capitalist system. Along with absurd wealth, it produces misery for millions and puts the basis of human life at risk. Does one howl with the wolves then and bury the dream of a liberated society for good, only because socialism had to accept a temporary defeat due to the revisionist betrayal in the Soviet Union or in China? Or does one help the gigantic progress of scientific knowledge and practical achievements in social production to break through against the maelstrom of pragmatism and opportunism, and join in the necessary revolutionary transformation of society?




The Crisis of Bourgeois Natural Science


Book Description

The third volume of the book series, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, deals with the crisis of bourgeois natural science. Natural scientists generally are held in high esteem in bourgeois society because they are seemingly apolitical, unimpeachable, and committed solely to social progress. With the advance of positivism and pragmatism, however, the natural sciences lost much of their scientificity and have gotten into a crisis. This polemic is intended to revive materialistically based free thinking in the working class. Unless it frees itself from the shackles of idealism and metaphysics, humanity will not be able to utilize the achievements of the modern natural sciences for social progress. Thus, this book is also a must for every scientist with a critical mind. It serves the purpose of helping scientific socialism and its dialectical-materialist method gain new esteem.




The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Anticommunism


Book Description

Justifiably, more and more people are losing confidence in the dominant politics. But what lessons do the workers and the masses in the world draw from the extensive crises? Bourgeois ideology has lost its power of attraction and is in deep crisis. An ideological struggle over interpretation and conclusions has broken out. Since the open crisis of reformism and modern revisionism, anticommunism has become the main obstacle in the building of the consciousness of the masses. However, anticommunism itself is in crisis, causing it to be constantly modified. This book follows the conviction that the time is ripe for an ideological offensive of scientific socialism. The books, Götterdämmerung Over the "New World Order," Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution, and Catastrophe Alert! What Is to Be Done Against the Willful Destruction of the Unity of Humanity and Nature? contain the analysis of the reorganization of international capitalist production as new phase of imperialism, along with the conclusions for the strategy and tactics of the international socialist revolution. This book has the task to complete this by dealing with the ideological side. It is the first of four volumes of the work, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, which will be published as Nos. 36 to 39 of the Revolutionärer Weg series.




The Ukraine War and the Open Crisis of the Imperialist World System


Book Description

"With the Ukraine war and the acute threat of a Third World War, a new phase of accelerated destabilization of the imperialist world system emerged within the framework of the general crisis of capitalism. It prepares the ground for a revolutionary world crisis. Thus the general crisisridden nature of imperialism takes on a new quality. All major contradictions of the imperialist world system are intensifying by leaps and bounds. ... This new starting situation abruptly changes the task of the revolutionary class struggle." (p. 58)




The State and Revolution


Book Description




The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci


Book Description

A major essay on the thought of the great Italian Marxist Perry Anderson’s essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” first published in New Left Review in 1976, was an explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist. Since then it has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci’s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, and war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci’s work, the essay shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany. Here arguments crisscrossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukács and Trotsky, with later echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections the essay provoked and the reasons for them. This edition also includes the first English translation of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures in prison.




National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism


Book Description

Several of Lenin's basic theoretical essays on nationalism and the right of nations to self-determination are brought together in this volume. They analyze the national question specifically and historically in Russia, Europe and Ireland and discuss national oppression, colonialism, great power chauvinism and opportunism in the national question. The book underlines the relationship of nationalism to imperialism and shows how the struggle for democracy and national liberation is integrated with the fight for socialism.




Legitimation Crisis


Book Description

Critical Theory originated in the perception by a group of German Marxists after the First World War that the Marxist analysis of capitalism had become deficient both empirically and with regard to its consequences for emancipation, and much of their work has attempted to deepen and extend it in new circumstances. Yet much of this revision has been in the form of piecemeal modification. In his latest work, Habermas has returned to the study of capitalism, incorporating the distinctive modifications of the Frankfurt School into the foundations of the critique of capitalism. Drawing on both systems theory and phenomenological sociology as well as Marxism, the author distinguishes four levels of capitalist crisis - economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivational crises. In his analysis, all the Frankfurt focus on cultural, personality, and authority structures finds its place, but in a systematic framework. At the same time, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, the author hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.




World Marxist Review


Book Description