Overview of all pages with the authors #James Heartfield

The failure of the capitalist class and the retreat from production

Book Review: Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession

October 26, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

WRITTEN IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2008 banking crash and published in 2012, Andrew Kliman’s The Failure of Capitalist Production adds to the extensive literature on American decline.1 Kliman identifies the way that profits have tended to fall relative to investments since the 1970s and also the diminishing rate of investment itself (the latter, he says, a consequence of the former)—a period of underaccumulation over the period from the mid-seventies to the present day, around 40 years, or longer than most people have been alive. [Read More]

Andrew Kliman Crisis

Tony Cliff's legacy today

International Socialism and the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky

July 4, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I became a Trotskyist in 1933. The theory of state capitalism is a development of Trotsky’s position… But at the end of the Second World War, the perspectives that Trotsky had put forward were not realized. Trotsky wrote that one thing was certain: the Stalinist bureaucracy would not survive the war. It would either be overthrown by revolution or by counterrevolution… The assumption was that the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy would be a fantastic opening for the Trotskyist movement, for the Fourth International. [Read More]

James Heartfield Tony Cliff Cliffism SWP (UK)

The anti-political party

Book Review: Ian Birchall. 'Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time'. London: Bookmarks, 2011.

April 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (SWP) is the largest political party left of the Labour Party, and has been active on the far left since 1977 and before that as the International Socialists since the 1960s. The party was led by Tony Cliff until his death thirteen years ago, and Ian Birchall, who has written this diligently researched memoir, is still a member since joining in the 1960s. Birchall’s “warts-and-all” examination is motivated by a marked unhappiness about A World To Win, the autobiography which Cliff apparently wrote based on recollection, without access to the relevant documentation. [Read More]

Book Review Tony Cliff Socialist Workers Party (UK) Ian Birchall SWP (UK) Cliffism Ian Birchall

Rebelling against the world

Book Review: Alex Butterworth, 'The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents'. New York: Pantheon Press, 2010.

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

“THE TERRORIST IS NOBLE, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero” (127). The man who spoke these words was Sergei Kravchinsky, the Tsarist officer turned anarchist who went on to assassinate the chief of the Russia’s secret police and expose that country’s autocracy before the world in the best-selling book Underground Russia. Terrorism was not restricted to Russia’s early revolutionary movement. [Read More]

Alex Butterworth Anarchism Terrorism

Living Marxism

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ONE OF THE STRANGER SIGHTS in today’s banking crisis is the sudden popularity of Karl Marx. The Manifesto is flying off the shelves, and business execs are boning up on Marx’s crisis theory in much the same way that they used to lap up Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or parrot Heraclitus’ saying that there is nothing permanent but change. Today’s economic dislocation, though, does not correspond to the crisis of overaccumulation that Marx explained in the third volume of his book Capital. [Read More]

Crisis Economics Karl Marx Marxism RCP (UK) Value Living Marxism