The following texts were written between 1973 and the present. Some of them, beginning in the late 1980s, were published in US journals such as Against the Current, New Politics, Critique, Collective Action Notes and Race Traitor; some have appeared translations. Others are appearing in the Marx / Third Millennium series of Queequeg Publications.

The majority, however, were consigned by circumstance to what Marx called "the gnawing critique of the mice." As such, they circulated only in xerox format to very limited circles of readers. I am posting them today, not because they necessarily possess any overarching coherence or because the evolution of one individual is of any particular importance. Rather, since different readers over the years have found different texts to be useful, I am using the new possibilities opened by the web to make them more generally available than they have been in my file cabinets.

Critique and comment are invited at: lrgoldner@alum.mit.edu

World Revolution for Beginners

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 Germany in November 1918. They are aimed at a young generation awakening to radical politics and to the history of the radical left in the last epoch when world revolution seemed a palpable possibility. (see my short article on the centennial of 1917).

The themes presented are Luxemburg and Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and the German Revolution. They are available in separate links under those titles.

Lenin and Luxemburg (World Revolution for Beginners, Part I

Stalin and Trotsky (World Revolution for Beginners Part II)

The German Revolution (World Revolution for Beginners Part III)

November 18, 2017 bthp

Articles English

"Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labor beyond the limits of its natural paltriness and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared, because a historically created need has replaced a natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the productive forces. It ceases to exist only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself." - Marx, Grundrisse

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