Socialist ABCs

It’s not often that the ideas of Karl Marx are discussed in the prestigious pages of the British Journal of Dermatology, but an article published there in January 2008 attempted to throw light not just on Marx’s state of physical health, but also on its supposed consequences for his entire worldview.

August 2010 marked the seventieth anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky at the hands of a Stalinist agent. Here we reprint an article by British Marxist Duncan Hallas on the life and legacy of Trotsky.

Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital was timely when it was published in 1913 and reads like a contemporary book today. Concluding her analysis of capitalist accumulation and imperialism, she forecast ‘a string of political and social disasters … punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes’.

Charles Darwin’s masterwork, On the Origin of Species, was published in November 1859. It initiated a revolution in science that continues to this day.

In Canada’s left culture today, it can be hard to imagine that revolutionary socialists were the dominant tradition on the left before World War One, among the leadership in the transition to industrial unionism by the 1940s (the force driving the creation of a Canadian welfare state), and an organized force of thousands in the 1960s and 1970s influencing a wide spectrum of struggles.

Many people think socialism is an extreme philosophy. It speaks volumes about the rottenness of capitalist society that ideas of equality, of organising and democratically controlling the economy to eliminate poverty, and to remove the sources of exploitation and oppression, are considered radical.