In 1949, Ted Grant, founder of the Militant Tendency and Socialist Appeal, wrote a polemical response to Tony Cliff on the class nature of the Soviet Union, arguing against Cliff’s theory of “State Capitalism”. Ted’s response provides an in-depth Marxist analysis on a range of questions, from the transition from capitalism to socialism, to the key issues of the state and the nature of Stalinism.

Adam Booth, writer for www.socialist.net, discusses the Marxist conception of history, based on the dialectical materialist method. Adam contrasts the materialist method of historical analysis against the idealist view of history, and explores questions such as the role of the individual history.

This article by Alan Woods – published in the second edition of the In Defence of Marxism magazine – deals with barbarism and the development of human society. In post-modern writing, history appears as an essentially meaningless and inexplicable series of random events or accidents. It is governed by no laws that we can comprehend. This denial of progress in history is characteristic of the psychology of the bourgeoisie in the phase of capitalist decline.