A Free Retriever’s Digest Vol. 3 #2 (April – June 2019)

Current Issue:

36 pages (A4, pdf)

Available for free download here:

190428 A Free Retriever’s Digest Nr 02

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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.

The consecutive parts of this series will be published on the ‘topics’ pages of this blog and announced on this 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)

The Algerian Crisis

‘Nuevo Curso’ on the mass protests in the Maghreb

With a country in general uproar, Bouteflika waited until the last moment to present his presidential candidacy. (¹) The demonstrators are still on the warpath because they know that the official candidacy wins. (²) But why should the fossilized Algerian bourgeoisie impose a dying Bouteflika who survives on medical care in Geneva?

Robin Goodfellow in the Land of the ‘Yellow Vests’

A critique by the Pantopolis blog (March 15, 2019)

We are happy to [refer to] the latest text from the group Robin Goodfellow (RGF). (¹) Coming from the Bordigist camp, it has striven to always be in tune with the class struggle, despite the desperately academic tone of its publications.

This text shows a positive spirit of openness towards the movement of the ‘yellow vests’, in which proletarians predominate. Contrary to some sects falsely laying claim to left-wing communism, Robin Goodfellow did not spit on the movement, quite the contrary. These sects did, by the way, not manifest an “aristocratism” of revolutionary “purists”, but rather the ubuesque (²) holy fear of micro-bureaucrats, ready to hide under their beds at the first signs of serious confrontation with the “forces of order”, shamefully describing the healthy reaction of the yellow vests to the terrible force of the capitalist state (³) as “useless violence.”

The text of Robin Goodfellow is very precise on the classes, or rather the heterogeneous layers that have intervened in the movement of the ‘yellow vests’. It deserves to be welcomed for demonstrating that, in the ‘yellow vests’ movement, the proletariat is very much present (workers, employees), even as a vast majority.

Marxist-Humanism at the crossroads

A Press Review on the inter-imperialist standoff about Venezuela

After the fuss about the failed “humanitarian” aid operation, the economic crisis and the boycott by the United States drag on. As usual, the proletarians in particular suffer from a lack of basic necessities and medicines. In this case, they are also called upon to defend the interests of one of the two groups within the ruling class of Venezuela, those around the incumbent president Maduro (supported by the corrupt army summit, Russia, China, Turkey and Iran) and the self-proclaimed interim president Guaidó (supported by entrepreneurs and the US and — in an unprecedented action — the EU). This false choice is fought by (as far as known) all publications that defend the standpoint of proletarian internationalism, that is, those who invoke the Communist Left against both Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’, and against the defense of the Soviet Union by most Trotskyists as a ‘workers state’, despite its ‘degeneration’ and ‘bureaucratization’, later followed by a ‘critical’ defense of the Eastern European ‘popular democracies’ and other ‘socialist’ countries that participated in the Russian bloc.

The Workers’ Councils in Germany 1918-23 (Part 2/2)

This is the second and last part of the historical summary article by Ph. Bourrinet on the workers’ councils in the proletarian struggles of 1918 -1923. The first part has been published in A Free Retriever’s Digest Vol.2 #6 (December 2018 – January 2019) and can be read on this web blog as well.

 

A Free Retriever’s Digest Vol. 3 #1 (February – March 2019)

Table of Contents:

36 pages (A4, pdf)

Available for free download here:

190214 A Free Retriever’s Digest Nr 01