PaulHampton's blog

Review of Mark Lynas, The God Species (2011)

Mark Lynas has written a provocative book that deserves to be read and discussed by socialists, trade unionists and ecologists. Lynas is a long time green activist who has ditched many of the sacred cows he has spent his life campaigning against – nuclear power, GM crops and organic farming are the...

Another disgraceful article by Milne on Libya

Unprepared to acknowledge his catastrophic mis-assessment of the situation in Libya, unreconstructed Stalinist Seamus Milne prefers to serve up more wholesale historical revisionism. Milne has throughout this year denied that Gaddafi's forces were about to commit a massacre in Benghazi in February...

From permanent revolution to permanent mystification

Review of Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (Haymarket 2010)

Trotsky warned against turning permanent revolution into a “superhistorical master-key” applicable to all societies in all circumstances. He rejected a “theological”...

The origins of permanent revolution

Review of Richard Day and Daniel Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, (Haymarket 2011)

Permanent revolution was one of Leon Trotsky’s outstanding contributions to Marxism. Permanent revolution defined Trotsky’s Marxism throughout his life: from his earliest leadership of the Petrograd Soviet...

Lenin the dreamer

“The dreamer himself sees in his dream a great and sacred truth; and he works, works conscientiously and with full strength, for his dream to stop being just a dream. His whole life is arranged according to one guiding idea and it is filled with the most strenuous activity. He is happy, despite...

Review of The Ecological Rift by John Bellamy Foster et al

The Ecological Rift, the latest book by John Bellamy Foster and his co-thinkers Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future”, as Marx put it in the Communist...

The pessimism of climate radicals

It is a measure of the state of climate politics when apparently radical thinkers accommodate themselves to the mainstream. In Climate Capitalism by Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson (2010) the disorientation of climate activists has found its academic expression.

Paterson wrote one of the seminal...

Fit only for the recycling bin of history

Paul Hampton reviews Derek Wall, The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement (2010)

Ecosocialism is a fudge. It is a swamp with little coherence and even less ground. This book is impressionistic, superficial and politically flawed. Despite a reputation for ecumenicalism...

Gramsci is ours

Review of Antonio Gramsci by Antonio Santucci, Monthly Review Press (2010)

“In mass politics, to say the truth is precisely a political necessity.” (2010 p.158)

The life of Antonio Gramsci is rightly well known. Born in Sardinia on 22 January 1891, he had to go to work at the age of 11 after his...

Venezuelan elections – setback for Chávez

The bonapartist regime of Hugo Chávez suffered a setback in the Venezuelan elections on 26 September, winning a majority of parliamentary seats but not the two-thirds majority it desired. The ruling party, Chávez’s PSUV gained 98 of the 165 seats available in the national assembly – enough for a...

The new Marxist geography

Review of Noel Castree and others, The point is to change it: geographies of hope and survival in an age of crisis (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell).

Marxist geography – what its chief exponent David Harvey has called “geographical historical materialism” – has enjoyed an impressive renaissance in...

Fidel Castro is right (there, I said it for once)

Fidel Castro is right. Hard to spit out, but absolutely right. Speaking to an American journalist and a policy analyst (as reported in the Guardian):

1) Castro criticised Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by...

Les Hearn on climate change 1988-89

For many years our paper Socialist Organiser, a forerunner of Solidarity published between 1978 and 1995, carried a science column written by Les Hearn. Among other important contributions, the column warned socialist of the importance of what was then generally known as the “greenhouse effect”....

Workers’ plans and ecology in the 1970s

During the 1970s, a large number of workplace unions and rank and file organisations in Britain produced workers’ plans, to tackle unemployment, restructuring and other employers’ attacks. These plans invariably questioned the logic of capitalist production for profit and asserted the need for...

Green Bans in Australia

In the early 1970s one of the most inspiring labour movement-based environmental campaigns was led by building workers in Australia. The story is recounted in Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann’s Green Bans, Red Union (1998) and Greg Mallory’s, Uncharted Waters (2005). The AWL published an...

The Bolsheviks and ecology

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the first time in history that the working class took power and held it for a significant period. (The Paris Commune in 1871 was a workers’ government, but was confined to one city and lasted just over two months). It is therefore a vital reference point...

Classical German social democracy and ecology

Classical German Marxism had a decent record of socialist ecology in the years after its founding in 1870s until it was smashed by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s. Besides publishing the works of Marx and Engels, central leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht...

Sustainable communism

Marx and Engels’ conception of communism from the beginning was consistent with the sustainability. For example in 1843, Engels wrote in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy that communism would be “the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself”. (MECW 3 p.424) Soon after that...

Stalinism and ecology - Cuba

“Thus has been the story of mankind; to struggle to overcome the laws of nature; to struggle to dominate nature and have it serve mankind.” (1966)
“Unless we conquer nature, nature will conquer us.” (1970)
Fidel Castro

The AWL characterises Cuba as a Stalinist state, where workers do not hold...

Stalinism and ecology - China

“For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.”
Mao, Red Book, Speech at the inaugural meeting of the Natural Science Research Society of the Border Region (February 5, 1940)...

Stalinism and ecology – the USSR

The AWL argues that Stalinism was responsible for an epochal defeat of the global working class. In the Stalinist states of USSR after 1928, Eastern Europe after 1945, as well as China since 1949, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, the working class was atomised and repressed – prevented from even...

Classical Marxism and energy

Classical Marxists took a keen interest in energy technology and the exhaustion of energy sources. They were early advocates of renewable technologies. For example on 9 June 1881, French socialist Paul Lafargue wrote to Jules Guesde about a new battery which by storing electricity. Lafargue asserted...

Marxism and entropy

Marxism is criticised by some ecologists as inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics, and in particular the second law of entropy — that energy is only transformed from more ordered to less ordered forms. Marx and Engels are accused of responding indifferently or even negatively to Sergei...

Classical Marxism and climate impacts

Marx and Engels encountered early climate science while developing historical materialist theory. On 25 March 1868 Marx wrote to Engels, recommending a “very interesting” book on climate change by Carl Nikolaus Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, eine Geschichte beider, 1847 [Climate and the...

Towards a Marxist climate political economy

Marxists argue that production mediates the relationship between climate and society. Therefore an adequate political economy of climate change is vital for grounding action on the issue. In particular Marxism offers a radical alternative to the dominant neoliberal climate political economy which...

The production of nature and ecology

§1. Dualist conceptions of nature

The historical materialist critique of bourgeois conceptions of nature (and by extension to some Marxist conceptions) identifies a pervasive dualism running through modern thought. Smith has highlighted the complex and often contradictory versions of nature...

What Marxism offers climate change politics

For the AWL, Marxism is a coherent theory of social change. It offers a worked out alternative world view, irreplaceable insights and effective strategies that can help avert climate catastrophe.

In particular Marxism has a great deal to say about:
• How climate change is framed
• The causes of...

I was wrong on the "decline" of capitalism

Sometimes contrition is the better part of valour. A decade or so ago there was an exchange in the pages of Workers’ Liberty magazine on the decline of capitalism. The AWL has recently reprinted these in as pamphlet, “Capitalism in our times”. At the time Martin Thomas argued that capitalism was...

Why Trotskyist theory matters

The most notorious contribution to Marxism made by Ted Grant was his theory of so-called “Proletarian Bonapartism”. Grant regarded the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state, following the unstable and ever-shifting formula of Trotsky in the 1930s. Grant pioneered the view after World War Two that the...

Seamus Milne’s apology for Chinese Stalinism

Those who doubt the malign influence of Stalinism should read Seamus Milne’s carefully worded eulogy of the Chinese ruling class in the Guardian on 1 July (here).

Milne describes the benefits of “China’s economic model”, slipping in a gratuitous reference to its constitution, which states China is...

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