James Heartfield

I HAVE RELUCTANTLY DECIDED TO RESPOND to James Heartfield’s review (Platypus Review #70) of The Failure of Capitalist Production because more than a few people seem to think his review is a serious and interesting engagement with my book. I want to explain why it is not. My task is made somewhat easier because I need not deal with the self-contradictory character of Heartfield’s review. Philip Cunliffe’s critique of it in The Platypus Review #72 deals with that problem quite well. [Read More]

SPEAKING FOR THE International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) at the Left Forum, Jason Wright recently observed, “It seems for a while now that it has been the desire of Platypus to have a three-way conversation be tween New Left Maoism (as one of the more palatable faces of Stalinism), orthodox Trotskyism,” and Platypus themselves, who tend to put speakers in situations significantly less comfortable than their catechistic internal meetings. At a roundtable with the IBT, Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Platypus, it would be difficult to discern which group has done a larger disservice to the workers’ movement. [Read More]

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]

Over! What a stupid name. Why over? Over pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternal creation, When all is subject to annihilation? Now it is over. What meaning can one see? It is as if it had not come to be, And yet it circulates as if it were. —Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust THE LAST FORTY YEARS have been conceptually be­wildering for the Left. The withering of working class movements and the rise of the new social movements have coincided with a global shift away from national state-centric (or “Fordist”) modes of accumulation towards a more “global,” neo-liberal capitalism. [Read More]