Preface The three texts published here are transcripts of talks given in New York City in summer 2013. They focus on the German-Polish-Russian corridor in the years before, during and after the First World War. The boundaries in space and time are ultimately the Russian revolutions (March, November) of 1917 and the failed revolution in […]
Loren: My name is Loren and what we’re going to deal with today is Lenin and Luxemburg. This is a huge topic. Both of these people are great revolutionaries and there are libraries of books written about them. So in two hours, I’m going to try to sort of summarize what I think is really […]
Loren: I photocopied a little map of Russia. Unfortunately it’s from a book in French but I think you can figure it out, all the names are pretty much the same. I know some people probably are not so familiar with the geography that we are talking about. So here you have some kind of […]
Loren: I put translations of the most important initials of organizations (SPD, KPD, etc.) up on the board. As I talk, I’m generally going to use the initials, just so everybody knows what they refer to. I don’t know if we’re going to really get to the Nazi seizure of power. If we do, it […]
On the Extreme Margins of the Centennial of the October Revolution: The Legacy of 1917 We Can Affirm Loren Goldner The year 1917 is most closely associated with the Russian Revolution, but it is more important to locate that revolution in the global tidal wave of working-class struggle from 1917 to 1921 (continued up to […]
US-China Relations in the Era of Trump Loren Goldner (The following purports to be, not so much an article, but more an outline of major themes or theses presented at the June 24-25 2017 International Worker Activists conference in Seoul. ) 1. U.S. policymakers often discuss,as an analogy to the current situation of US- China […]
Loren Goldner Let’s begin with the purely electoral aspect of Trump’s victory in November. He lost the popular vote by 65 million to 62 million, but that didn’t matter because he won the archaic Electoral College by 304 to 227. The Electoral College was established in the late 18th century to ensure that small (mainly […]
Book Review: Joshua Kurlantzick A Great Place to Have a War America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA New York, 2016 Loren Goldner by Loren Goldner Few people in America today know where the small (population 7 million) Asian country Laos is. Far fewer still knew in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, […]
Book Review David Bandurski Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance in Urbanizing China (Melvile House 2016) Loren Goldner In 2030, one billion Chinese will live in cities, two-thirds of the total population, or one of every eight people on the planet. At the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, 80% of the 400 […]
(The following appeared as the editorial in Insurgent Notes No. 14, shortly after the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.) insurgentnotes.com Donald Trump will be the next president. What was unthinkable has become all too real. We anticipated as much in the editorial in our last issue, which we […]
For an academic work, this is a quite good, fact-packed but flawed book about one militant strike in the U.S., the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995-2000, which took place during a generally bleak decade for class struggle.
This book portrays more vividly than most the take-no-prisoners barbarism of which the American capitalist class and its military are capable.
Part Three of an ongoing NYC lecture and discussion series with left communist intellectual Loren Goldner.
Part Two of an ongoing NYC lecture and discussion series by left communist intellectual Loren Goldner.
Part One of an ongoing NYC lecture and discussion series by left communist intellectual Loren Goldner.
Putting these two books back-to-back, we arrive at a rather thorough picture of British working-class history since World War II, and particularly since the coming of Margaret Thatcher and the “neo-liberal” era in 1979.
The movement had “two souls”, one increasingly focused on Chavez’s strategy of boycotts and outside political influence, the other growing from the rank-and-file militancy of the farm workers themselves.
This is one of the few books published since 1991 on the “Russian question” that will compel people long wedded to different characterizations of the post-1917 or post-1929 Soviet regime to think through their commitments.
Discussion of various contemporary struggles with imperialism.
There is a largely forgotten history of reactionary populist and “anti-imperialist” movements in the underdeveloped world, that do not shrink from mobilizing the working class to achieve their goals.
Writer and activist Loren Goldner contextualizes the current economic crisis and class struggles in a theory of capitalist development.
The past four decades of class warfare in which only one side, the capitalist class, was fighting—have come to an end.
I managed to get to Madison, Wisconsin, for a mass demonstration in the ongoing mobilization against Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public employee unions.
The rise and recent fall of Andy Stern illustrates, as if through a glass darkly, that in this epoch there is nothing positive for the class as a whole to be achieved through the unions.
Our task must be to articulate the full implications of that positive power which lies beyond the disorientation of today. We must show where that potential surfaces in micro-ways in the struggles of the present.
I spoke with Loren Goldner on Friday about the 77-day occupation of the Ssangyong automotive plant in Pyeongtaek, South Korea.
Fitch’s “In Defense of Washington and Wall Street”, while making some good points about the unraveling of the world financial system, is seriously flawed.
We must re-examine a profoundly reactionary ideology by which any force, no matter how retrograde, that turns a gun against a Western power becomes “progressive” and worthy of “critical” or “military” support, or for the less subtle, simply “support”.
For the 976 workers who seized the small auto plant on May 22 and held it against repeated quasi-military assault, the settlement represented a near-total defeat.
A historical elaboration of the context in which a socialist and later specifically Marxist left arose in Japan, China and Korea.
The US is playing the Great Game II, as a strategy to keep the Eurasian powers off balance, and to preserve the ever-growing mass of nomad dollars from deflation and displacement.
![[Roman] Conjunctura: capitalismul mondial de la căderea sistemului Bretton Woods](http://bthp23.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/1976/07/image002.gif)
Marx’s materialism was no mere epistemological stance, but was in fact, as Engels later called it, “the germ of a new world outlook.”
Comrades, history has offered us an opening which, if we fail, will not come again in our lifetimes.
The bureaucratic remnants of the radical democratic unions of the early 1990’s are today reviled corporative organizations of that working-class elite, and as many struggles take place between regular and casualized workers as against capital itself.
A talk with Loren Goldner on the current capitalist crisis.
A three-part interview in Seoul, South Korea, with militants of a small Korean Marxist group, SaNoShin, which is becoming increasingly influenced by left communist theory.
“Interview with independent writer and activist, Loren Goldner.
Far from being a remote “economic” concept, fictitious capital leads us straight to the central political questions of today, and above all those questions confronting the international left.
PDF available for download.
In spite of Eastman’s sharp turn to the right, he managed in the 1950’s and 1960’s to write two volumes of memoirs that still capture, without cynicism, the great hopes of his youth.
The world is still in the early phase of an inflationary blow-out centered on the indebted “U.S. consumer” as the “locomotive” of the world economy.
This article aims to bring the rich Argentine experience of strategy and tactics to an international audience, to hopefully stimulate further discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.
The following is a “thought experiment” which attempts to see fictitious capital in relation to the end of capitalism.
China will emerge as a superpower or as “the” hegemon only through a bloody reshuffling of the capitalist deck, and not through the kind of “normal” development that achieved world hegemony for Britain after 1815.
Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them.
Joao Bernardo has to be one of the most prolific, and prodigious, radical theoreticians of the past 30 years, yet, because he writes in his native Portuguese and because very little of his work has been translated into English, he remains largely unknown in the world of Anglophone Marxism.
Remaining in his lofty (but admittedly indispensable) realm of abstraction, seemingly oblivious to the concrete history of the “real movement that abolishes existing conditions” as the force which drives the evolution of its inverted form, capital, Postone only gets it half right
In the past forty years, it has become easier to draw a sharp line between Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of value. and between Ricardo’s economics and Marx’s critique of political economy.
Bourseiller’s book is the only one in existence, in any language, that attempts to treat the history of the ultra-left in its entirety.
What came to be known as the “Johnson-Forest tendency” of the Workers’ Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the U.S., was a tendency whose influence has rippled far beyond its original small forces within two American Trotskyist groups before, during and after World War II.
Southern California supermarket workers voted 86% to end their five-month old strike, accepting a contract that amounts to a serious, if not total, victory for a determined employer offensive with national implications.
The fundamental problem for U.S. capitalism is to globally circulate the mass of fictitious capital that has built up over 45 years of subsidized dollar hegemony, making possible that capital’s valorization by extracting an adequate amount of surplus value.
A fundamental dynamic in American history involves the triad of race, imperial expansion, and class.
What I would like to do here today, is to present two parts of an analysis of class struggle in the United States. The first part will be more historical and the second part will be about the developments of the last twenty years or so.
The discussion between Loren Goldner and Aufheben is, in essence, about the role of fictitious capital in the crisis of capitalism but they disagree already about what fictitious capital actually is.
The Portuguese Marxist and prolific writer Joao Bernardo remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone world, a situation hopefully to be remedied soon by an English translation of his three-volume masterpiece on the Middle Ages, Poder e Dinheiro.
In these days of war without end in the Middle East, and Kerry vs. Bush, and visible “politics” in the U.S. seemingly reduced to a right-wing party and a far-right party, the book gives me a high that makes me wants to run out the door and organize.
There will be expanded social reproduction in communism, focused once again on the “production for production’s sake”, not in the Ricardian sense of capitalist productivism but in the communist sense of creativity.
It is hardly a secret that the contemporary world is one of tremendous dislocation in which every advance of capital seems to entail, and require, a major retrogression of the human.
PDF available for download.
The following is a reply to the Aufheben Critique of Remaking of the American Working Class.
What I find most interesting in Facing Realityis not so much the answers it offers as the questions it asks. Those questions revolve around the role of the revolutionary Marxist party today.
Since 1988, interest in the work of Amadeo Bordiga has only increased[1], and seems on its way to eclipsing (hopefully with happier results) the earlier 1960s/1970s fascination with Antonio Gramsci.
Joao Bernardo has to be one of the most prolific, and prodigious, radical theoreticians of the past 30 years, yet, because he writes in his native Portuguese and because very little of his work has been translated into English, he remains largely unknown in the world of Anglophone Marxism.
Coogan’s excellent book, starting from an obscure American fascist figure who has little currency in the far-right of his own country, takes us into the whole world of the international fascist revival since 1945.
It was 1971. We were in our early 20’s and we were mad.
PDF available for download.
Despite all the elements of “uneven”, parochial or simply reactionary consciousness it may have contained, one has to characterize Seattle as a breakthrough.
The following is a translation of Chapter One of Alain Tizon and François Longchampt’s Votre Révolution nest pas la mienne.
Without any distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and without a serious look at the social reproduction of labor power, and without an awareness of how the vast inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. stock market skews figures for “American” firms, what can figures on “profits” mean?
Our experience over the past three decades in the U.S. has been conditioned and distorted by de-industrialization and the supposed triumph of the “post-industrial” “New Paradigm” economy associated with the computer, the Internet, e-commerce and so forth.
I am writing this in late October 1998 in what seems to be a pause in the latest phase of the world financial crisis.
PDF available for download.
Kamunist Kranti stands out as one of the few, if not the only ultra-left current with a genuine, years-long working-class presence, not merely in the Third World, but in the world, period.
The Western invention of the idea of race in the 17th century, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, was not merely a degradation of the peoples of color to whom it was applied. Such a degradation had to be preceded, and accompanied, by a comparable degradation of the view of man within Western culture itself.
Ngo Van’s book is unique, as his life has been unique; his book is the first full account of the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam from 1920 to 1945, by someone who lived much of that period as a Trotskyist militant.
Communism is neither a doctrine sprung from the head of a world reformer, nor a political organization; it is, as Marx said in the Manifesto, “the real movement unfolding before our eyes”.
It is not often recognized that, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period which Western history calls the Enlightenment, the concept of race did not exist.
Although these struggles have specific regional characteristics, they actually fit a national and, above all, international pattern.
The Online World Is Also On Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It) Loren Goldner The real “sixties”, of course, (at least for white middle-class American youth) started in approximately 1964 with the Berkeley student revolt and, following hard on that, with the appearance of the hippie […]
However unpalatable it may be to do so in the contemporary climate, where the Enlightenment project is everywhere under attack by Nietzscheans, “cultural studies” ideologues, Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, Foucaultians, Afrocentrists and (most) ecologists, it is necessary to discuss the limits of the Enlightenment in order to defend it, and to go beyond it.
Sections of French and, more recently, American academic discourse in the “human sciences” have been dominated for decades by a terminology originating not in Heidegger but first of all in the writings of Nazis.
I sat down my friend Scott McGuire in front of a tape recorder, and got him to tell me (again) the story of his involvement in the Boston public employees’ attempt to react to layoffs and cuts.
We know all too well a world in which the linear application of micro-rationality is quite compatible with macro-barbarism.
Bordiga was the last Western revolutionary who told off Stalin to his face as the gravedigger of the revolution, and lived to tell the tale. He is one of the most original, brilliant and utterly neglected Marxists of the century.
A critique of the Eurocentric conservatives and of the multiculturalists from the vantage point of an emerging WORLD culture.
The Polish workers’ movement opened an irreparable breach in Stalinist totalitarian rule, not in the name of Marx or Luxemburg, but with the blessings of the Pope, the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund and the Friedmanite school of economics.
Zukin may have written the first book connecting post-modernism to de-industrialization and economic austerity.
The question of the status of universality, whether attacked by its opponents as “white male”, or “Eurocentric”, or a “master discourse”, is today at the center of the current ideological debate
In 1848 and 1968, when working- class upsurges exploded in Europe under the slogans of “socialism” and “communism”, American working-class containment in the Democratic Party was exploded by the race question. This is the key to the Americanization of Marxism.
Review: A Critique of Kim Moody’s An Injury to All by Loren Goldner (The following originally appeared as a book review in ‘z’ magazine, 1989) Kim Moody has written an important book, which should, and will, be read and discussed by anyone interested in the past, present and future of the modern American working class. […]
There are few important currents in the history of the 20th century which are not influenced by an ideological oscillation between Marxian revolution and the ‘”conservative revolution” as it was conceived at the end of the nineteenth century.
An imposing biography of the “organizer of victory” of the October Revolution.
Twenty years ago, the problematic at the core of Josef Chytry’s The Aesthetic State occupied center stage.
At its most basic level, a history and analysis of the battle between two concepts of modern urbanism, which Rabinow characterizes as “tech no-cosmopolitanism” and “middling modernism.”
A kind of “thought experiment”, attempting to trace the career and impact of the “man of negation.”
At the approach of the 20th anniversary of the longest wildcat general strike in history, the press, publishers, and the media in France have geared up for the ultimate in “la mode retro.”
Kolko’s book is not so much “economics” as contemporary economic history, an attempt to explain the new realities that have emerged out of the present crisis.
PDF available for download.
The agrarian question is the key to the understanding of the rise and fall of the continental European socialist tradition, and that the failure of that tradition to make a serious impact in America is a reflection of the fact that American agriculture–with the important exception of the South prior to 1865–was always capitalist.
There is a disconcerting link between certain currents of ecological politics in Germany, the “New Age” ideologies these currents espouse, and their explicit or implicit connection to the politics of the extreme right.
An effort to show the very real historical and political conjuncture in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche, a context all but forgotten and dismissed as trivial in most of the contemporary discussion.
The translation of Ernst Bloch’s major work Principle of Hope into English constitutes an event in its own right in the consolidation of a serious Marxist current in the English speaking world.
Part of a growing body of serious social histories of culture that address the issues raised by theory in the only terrain where they can be settled: the social, economic, political, and cultural totalities that throw them up in the first place.
In the U.S., in contrast to all other major capitalist countries, capitalism made the transition to the intensive phase of accumulation without requiring the participation of a working-class political party in the state.
Aims to question the currently existing lines between “culture” and “nature,” and to posit a possible unitary theory encompassing both.
2002 Note: The following was the self-introduction of the sole issue of the journal Strategy, which appeared, and disappeared, in the spring of 1977, with little fanfare. Though I would write it rather differently today, I think its basic point–the difference between a Marxist conjunctural perspective and the typical left-wing politics of populist resentment–remains entirely valid. […]
