A Free Retriever’s Digest Vol.3 #3 (July – September 2019)

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38 pages (A4, pdf)

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190715 A Free Retriever’s Digest Nr 03

 

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Willy Huhn (1961): On the doctrine of the revolutionary party (2)

Willy Huhn poses the question how far Lenin has “directly taken up the doctrine of Marx and Engels in the question of the Party”, as his adversary Dracker puts it. Contrary to the latter’s a-historical approach, Huhn endeavors to explain how the organizational question arose in the practice of the 1848 bourgeois revolutions. In doing so, he shows that Lenin, in the (supposedly) bourgeois revolution in Russia from the outset of the 20th Century, represented a concept of organization that was substantially different from that of Marx and Engels.

Today more than 150 years have passed since the 1848 bourgeois revolutions; more than 100 years since the proletarian world revolution announced itself in the Red October of 1917, and more than 50 years since Huhn opposed Leninism in this text. The communist minorities again face the question of how to organize themselves to fulfill their function in the workers’ struggle. Huhn’s text advances  essential elements for a valid reply, even if it is still deeply influenced by the last years of the counterrevolution at the time.

In this second part of our translation Huhn continues his demonstration on the role of communist minorities at the hand of two speeches addressed to the Communists’ League by its central authority in the Spring of 1850 in view of reorganizing the League after the defeat of the 1848 democratic uprisings throughout Europe, with the expectation of a new upsurge soon to come.

Spartacus and Trotskyism (1946)

Introduction

After the Second World War, the Communists’ League “Spartacus” emerged from illegality in the Netherlands as one of the few groups in the world that put forward the struggle of the working class against all imperialist camps, i.e. against fascism, against bourgeois democracy and against Stalinism. They were also opposed to the Trotskyism of the so-called Fourth International, which took part in the Second World War in defense of Russian state capitalism.

The following text from the communist League’s weekly publication ‘Spartacus’ in 1946 shows how the Trotskyists tried to get a grip on the League and how they falsified the history of the latter’s main predecessors, the R.S.A.P., portraying the proletarian internationalists as ultra-radicals. This Trotskyist tactic is still relevant today.

With reference to this first time translation, we have added a concise glossary on the most important organizational expressions of the historical communist Left in the Netherlands.

‘250 years of Capitalism’ (Project Update)

A rapid overview of 250 years of Capitalism 

A concise summary of this work in progress;

Table of Contents

A listing of the translated sections on this blog.

250 years of Capitalism – A reconstruction of its dynamics

A Work in progress  The following pages present an article treating 250 years of Capitalism at the hand of examined statistical sources on its economic dynamic, tracing its main periods at the hand of classical criteria developed by Marx in ‘Capital’. As this is a work in progress, our translation of its subsequent parts will…

250 years of Capitalism (Annex on the data and on methodology)

Main economic variables (1760 – 2018). Sources and Presentation of the Data. Data sources for our graphs. Data on GDP per capita, labor productivity per worker and real wages (see below for more details) are from the Core project: Unit-2-data-file-for-charts. Those on life expectancy at birth are from version 7 of the Gapminder database. The…

 

‘Nuevo Curso’ apropos of a failure of ‘youth care’ in the Netherlands

The following presents an article by ‘Nuevo Curso’ apropos of the tragic suicide of a youngster, that was immediately subjected to an international media campaign on “state sponsored euthanasia” in the Netherlands. Our commentary shows how easily one can fall into hawking a rant, when not observing minimal standards of verification. In a separate topic article we present the results of a first examination of official mortality statistics in this country by medical end-of-life decisions over the period 1995 – 2015.

On the escalation of imperialist tensions in the Persian Gulf

Faced with the escalation of the imperialist tensions over the Persian Gulf area, highlighting the confrontation between the USA, Iran and their respective allies, we adopt a recent update article from the ICT website, followed by a joint declaration by two other proletarian internationalist groups; the ‘Gulf Coast Communist Fraction’ (USA) and ‘Internationalist Voice’.

250 years of Capitalism: A reconstruction of its dynamics (Part 1)

A Work in progress

“I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself. […] Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.” Karl Marx, Preface to the First German Edition of Capital.

Taking up a longstanding concern of Marx’s he was unable to fulfill, the following presents the first part of an article series treating 250 years of Capitalism at the hand of examined statistic sources on its economic dynamic, in order to draw out its perspectives.

Updates and the subsequent parts of this series will be published on  special pages on this blog and announced on the blog roll. The original version in French language is published at the ‘Capitalisme & Crises Économiques’ website.

The editor

Willy Huhn (1961): On the doctrine of the revolutionary party (1)

In ‘A Free Retriever’s Digest’ Vol.2 #1 (February -March 2018) we presented a biographic work on the council communist Willy Huhn (1909 – 1970), together with a concise review (Book Review: “In Search of Rosa’s Heritage”). Subsequently we translated a text expounding Huhn’s view on Lenin:  Willy Huhn (1948): ‘Lenin as a Utopian’ (in Vol.2 #2, April – May 2018).  In the following  we resume our translation series with (the first part of) a more extensive article, in which Huhn compares the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ conception of the communist party and that developed by Marx and Engels, in a polemic that took place in the early 1960s.

Willy Huhn poses the question how far Lenin has “directly taken up the doctrine of Marx and Engels in the question of the Party”, as his adversary put it. Contrary to Dracker’s ahistorical approach, Huhn endeavors to explain how the organizational question arose in the practice of the 1848 bourgeois revolutions. In doing so, he shows that Lenin, in the (supposedly) bourgeois revolution in Russia from the outset of the 20th Century, represented a concept of organization that was substantially different from that of Marx and Engels.

Today more than 150 years have passed since the 1848 bourgeois revolutions; more than 100 years since the proletarian world revolution announced itself in the Red October of 1917, and more than 50 years since Huhn opposed Leninism in this text. The communist minorities again face the question of how to organize themselves to fulfill their function in the workers’ struggle. Huhn’s text advances  essential elements for a valid reply, even if it is still deeply influenced by the last years of the counterrevolution at the time.

War tensions in the Persian Gulf and the South-Chinese Sea

A bloody mess

An actualization by ‘Nuevo Curso’

From the Strait of Hormuz to the South China Sea, the U.S.A. are escalating tensions in the most important imperialist conflict zones, threatening to transform the trade war into a major military war. In the following we present a brief appreciation of this situation by the Spanish blog of the proletarian internationalist group ‘Emancipacion’.

Trade Unions and the Left Against the Mass Strike in Mexico

Lessons from the workers’ struggle in Matamoros

Introduction by ‘Nuevo Curso’

The development of “wild” and mass strikes in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, (¹) is the most important class struggle in the Americas in years. We have followed it as closely as we could on our news channels, but only broadly in our journal. (²) Hereafter we publish a summary of the latest events, that was sent to us by a group of comrades from Matamoros, and that is born out of the need to draw lessons in the heat of the struggles. (‘Nuevo Curso’, April 9, 2019)