Direct Action Office Trades Hall basement

cnr Lygon & Victoria Sts Carlton (enter Victoria St).

By Doug Lorimer

[Talk presented to January RSP Marxism education conference.]

In a December 1915 introduction to Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin’s book Imperialism and World Economy, Lenin wrote:

“There had been an epoch of a comparatively ‘peaceful capitalism’, when it had overcome feudalism in the advanced countries of Europe and was in a position to develop comparatively tranquilly and harmoniously, ‘peacefully’ spreading over tremendous areas of still unoccupied lands, and of countries not yet finally drawn into the capitalist vortex. Of course, even in that epoch, marked approximately by the years 1871 and 1914, ‘peaceful’ capitalism created conditions of life that were very far from being really peaceful both in the military and in a general class sense. For nine-tenths of the population of the advanced countries, for hundreds of millions of peoples in the colonies and in the backward countries this epoch was not one of ‘peace’ but of oppression, tortures, horrors that seemed the more terrifying since they appeared to be without end. This epoch has gone forever. It has been followed by a new epoch, comparatively more impetuous, full of abrupt changes, catastrophes, conflicts, an epoch that no longer appears to the toiling masses as horror without end but is an end full of horrors.

Reflections of Fidel

The world half a century later

Rally talk at DSP educational conference, January 3-7, 1998

Perhaps around the Xmas dinner table this year, being quizzed by parents you haven’t seen for many months, or an aunt you haven’t seen for years, comrades have been met by a familiar refrain:

You’re a socialist? How could you be a socialist today?

How could you be a socialist after what happened in Russia? Isn’t socialism finished with now?

Or perhaps more regularly, as you’re arguing the point with a potential Green Left Weekly buyer, you get similar questions:

by John Percy

By Zoe Kenny

Feature Talk: International capitalism and its crises long & short term trends by Jorge Jorquera at the Revolutionary Socialist Party Marxist Education Conference January 2-5, 2010

By Peter Camejo

Peter Camejo was a longtime leader of the United States Socialist Workers Party. As a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group associated with the SWP, Camejo was a prominent activist in the student movement at the University of California in Berkeley and in the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was the presidential candidate of the SWP in 1976.

[Talk presented to RSP Marxist Education conference January 2-5, 2010]

By Allen Myers

The 19th century US writer and humorist Mark Twain said that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. He was able to make that joke because nobody at that time realised how capitalism was changing the weather. On the other hand, Twain’s remark has an unexpected relevance today: it could be a commentary on the Copenhagen meeting, where hundreds of heads of government talked about the weather but did nothing about preventing further changes.