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Welcome to Marxist University 2022, four days of online discussion dedicated to understanding the fundamental principles of Marxism, hosted by the International Marxist Tendency on 23-26 July.
The world is in a deep crisis. War, inequality, suffering and the pandemic have become the new normal for life under capitalism. Yet the ruling class, politicians, and their ideologues in bourgeois academia have proven their inability to even understand the seemingly chaotic world we live in, let alone change it for the better. In all this uncertainty, Marxism stands out as the only method capable of making sense of the turmoil and providing a practical basis to fight for our future.
For this reason, Marxist University 2022 will focus on the three pillars of Marxism: the revolutionary philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx’s economic insights into the contradictions of capitalism, and historical materialism, the Marxist approach to history. There can be no better antidote to the confusion of today’s world than studying these fundamentals and learning how we can defend them against the attacks of capitalism’s apologists.
The world is in a deep crisis. War, inequality, suffering and the pandemic have become the new normal for life under capitalism. Yet the ruling class, politicians, and their ideologues in bourgeois academia have proven their inability to even understand the seemingly chaotic world we live in, let alone change it for the better. In all this uncertainty, Marxism stands out as the only method capable of making sense of the turmoil and providing a practical basis to fight for our future.
For this reason, Marxist University 2022 will focus on the three pillars of Marxism: the revolutionary philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx’s economic insights into the contradictions of capitalism, and historical materialism, the Marxist approach to history. There can be no better antidote to the confusion of today’s world than studying these fundamentals and learning how we can defend them against the attacks of capitalism’s apologists.
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Subscribe to International Marxist Radio: a new, weekly podcast series from the IMT. Episode 1, with Alan Woods on world politics at the dawn of 2023, is out now. Main feed – contains latest episodes and links to all streaming platforms: https://podcast.marxist.com/ First episode with Alan Woods: https://www.marxist.com/podcast-imr-1-2023-for-a-revolutionary-new-year.htm
In June, hundreds of revolutionaries from all over the world gathered in Italy for the founding conference of the Revolutionary Communist International, with thousands more participating online. In addition to officially establishing our new International, the conference was a school of communism, with around 20 sessions on all aspects of our theory, history and thought. […]
Communism is international, or it is nothing. This was clearly understood by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, who all recognised the necessity to unite the struggles of workers, regardless of all national divisions against their common enemy: capitalism. Today, that message is more relevant and necessary than ever. The capitalist system is in a deep […]
In order to transform the world, we must first understand it. In this speech, the RCI’s leading theoretician, Alan Woods, explains dialectics: a revolutionary school of thought, which holds that nothing is fixed or static. Taking his starting point from the great idealist German Philosopher Hegel, Karl Marx placed dialectics on a sound materialist basis. […]
We are often told that the fall of the Soviet Union was incontrovertible evidence of the failure of communism. This concerted campaign of slanders and lies, which falsely ties communism to the bureaucratic crimes of Stalinism, is spread by the ruling class and their cronies in order to undermine the struggle to overthrow capitalism today. […]
The degeneration of the Soviet Union into a dictatorial parody of socialism, at the hands of Stalin’s counterrevolutionary clique of bureaucrats, is one of the great tragedies of world history. Today, our critics use this example to argue that communism always results in a small clique at the top controlling everything. But as Jerome Mellatus, […]
The Bolsheviks did not simply spring into being fully formed. The party was built painstakingly over the course of many years, chiefly by Lenin, to serve as an instrument for the revolutionary workers and peasants when the time was right. As Antonio Balmer, one of our leading comrades from the USA explains, the history of […]
In the October Revolution of 1917, the Russian workers and peasants took power with the Bolsheviks at their head, but Lenin understood that socialism could not be built in Russia alone. That’s why he and the Bolsheviks founded the Third, Communist International – or Comintern – as a single party of world revolution, bringing together […]
Lenin and Trotsky are the two outstanding figures of the Russian Revolution. Despite differences of opinion over the course of their lives, after the October Revolution the two men were so widely identified as the leaders of the Bolshevik Party that it became colloquially known as “the Party of Lenin-Trotsky.” However, after Lenin’s death, the […]
After the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas ‘the Bloody’ Romanov in 1917, the new revolutionary regime in Russia (led by the Bolshevik Party) began the monumental task of socialist reconstruction. They were met almost immediately by the White counter-revolution, leading to a terrible Civil War in which the Bolsheviks led a life-or-death struggle to save the […]
Many people have a dismissive attitude towards philosophy: no doubt informed by the pretentious rubbish taught in university classrooms. But the fact is those without a worked-out way of viewing the world will unthinkingly regurgitate the ideas of the ruling elite. As Hamid Alizadeh, a leading member of the RCI, explains in this talk: communists […]
The October Revolution of 1917 was the first time in history that workers and peasants had taken on the bosses, landlords and capitalists and not only won, but held onto power. For this, communists today recognise the Russian Revolution as the greatest event in human history. It is for the same reason that today’s capitalists […]
Identity politics professes to unite oppressed people against their oppressors. But in reality, it merely distracts from the root cause of society’s ills, including racism, sexism, homophobia and every other form of bigotry. Capitalism could not survive without dividing the working class along the lines of race, gender and sexuality to prevent a common struggle […]
War is inevitable under capitalism. In fact, it is the direct consequence of imperialism. The struggle between competing nations for markets, fields of investment, and spheres of influence always results in clashes where workers fight and die to protect the profits of their ruling classes. In Lenin’s day, the capitalist rulers of Europe sent millions […]
Growing support for reactionary politicians like Trump and Le Pen, and parties like the AfD in Germany, have led to panic from the ‘serious’ bourgeois and reformists about the ‘crisis of democracy’, the rise of ‘right populism’ – even ‘fascism’. In reality, these phenomena represent a distorted rejection of the capitalist establishment. As leading Austrian […]
In the last analysis, economics – the means by which men and women produce and reproduce the means of existence – are the driving force of any society. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is one of his most important contributions. In the pages of Capital, one finds a scientific explanation of how capitalism functions, why it […]
As capitalism developed, rich and powerful nations rushed to plunder and carve up the world into markets, colonies, and spheres of influence. In the process, they subjected countless billions to war, enslavement and misery that continues to this day. Lenin wrote the defining work on the subject, explaining that imperialism represents the highest stage of […]
We communists have set ourselves the task of changing the course of world history. For that we need a theory of history, how it develops and changes and what role we, as communists, can play in bringing about that change. The saying popularly attributed to Henry Ford, that history is “just one damn thing after […]
Ever since the days of Marx and Engels, communists have understood that the struggle to overthrow capitalism is inherently international. This reflects the fact that capitalism is a global system, and that the power of the world market can only be overthrown by the planned cooperation of at least several countries, operating on the basis […]
Communists place a great deal of importance on education and theoretical study, but that doesn’t mean we confine ourselves to small reading groups. The question of building the revolutionary party is central. Once a small revolutionary organisation has grown to the size necessary to become a factor in the class struggle, how can the revolutionary […]
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