Marxist theory

Production
is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those
able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an
“army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of
losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a
profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great
hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more
unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit
motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for
an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to
increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of
labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I
mentioned before.

Harry DeBoer wrote this pamphlet in 1987 to inspire
a new generation of trade union activists with the militant traditions of US
labour’s past. As a young man he worked in the Minneapolis coal yards and
became caught up and radicalised in the Minneapolis ‘teamster rebellion’ of
1934. As he makes clear, this was a model strike, and it was led by Marxists.
(See our review of ‘Teamster Rebellion’ by Farrell Dobbs, another Trotskyist
and strike leader.)

A reply to ‘Comrade Clifford’ is an under-rated pamphlet by Ted Grant, partly because it has been fairly inaccessible for much of the time since it was written in 1966. Another reason it may be under-appreciated is because Brendan Clifford and his little sect have long since disappeared from the political scene. But, as usual with Ted, the arguments of this Stalinist and Maoist are just the basis for a wide-ranging Marxist survey of the entire history of Stalinism and the resistance to it nationally and internationally from 1917 to the Second World War and beyond.

We republish one of Ted Grant’s most important
writings. In the years after the Second World War the Trotskyist movement had to
reorient itself to a very different situation to that envisaged by Trotsky when
he had founded the Fourth International in 1938. Rather than falling into
crisis, capitalism in Western Europe and North America was experiencing a boom
which was later described as a ‘golden age’. After the post-War revolutionary
wave was seen off in the advanced capitalist countries, this made conditions
for revolutionaries very difficult. Illusions that capitalism had solved all
its problems began to develop quite widely. Ted analysed the causes of the boom
and why it would come to an end in ‘Will there be a slump?’ in 1960.’

Terry was a larger than life figure and a
fine representative of the Liverpool working
class. A ‘salt of the earth’ man who dedicated his efforts to the cause of the
working class. Always smiling and joking, he was always seen wearing his black
leather jacket, even in Parliament, a place he pretty much hated. He served his
time there from 1983, when he was elected along with Dave Nellist and later Pat
Wall as part of the Militant trio, until 1992. This was the culmination of
decades of work by Militant supporters in the Merseyside labour movement. They
had refused to abandon the struggle within the Labour Party.

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but for ever.

Karl Marx was a man with a family to look after, and a revolutionary
who no country acknowledged as citizen. A giant thinker of the modern
era who transformed our outlook in philosophy, economics and political
thought, Marx’s revolutionary activity was hobbled by poverty. Steve
Higham chronicles his hardships and achievements a century and a
quarter after his death.