Suchergebnisse

In 1911 Rudolf Hilferding, the author of the famous book Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, published an article on the history of English mercantilism in Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany edited by Karl Kautsky. The writing of the article was motivated by the publication, the previous year, of the third volume of Theories of Surplus-Value, containing Marx's analysis of the work of Richard Jones, as well as by the simultaneous appearance of a German edition of Thomas Mun's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade. This article introduces the present author's English translation of Hilferding's article on mercantilism, titled "The Early Days of English Political Economy," previously available only in German, and contextualizes it in the framework of the history of Marxist scholarship.

AbstractThe origins of the Transitional Programme in Trotsky's writings have been traced in the secondary literature. Much less attention has been paid to the earlier origins of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International between its Third and Fourth Congress, and in particular to the contribution of its largest national section outside Russia, the German Communist Party, which had been the origin of the turn to the united-front tactic in 1921. This article attempts to uncover the roots of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International. This task is important because it shows that the Transitional Programme's slogans are not sectarian shibboleths, but the result of the collective revolutionary experience of the working class during the period under consideration, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the founding conference of the Fourth International (1917–38).

The history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky remains, more than 80 years after Trotsky's death, largely terra incognita or, more accurately, a bazaar for all manner of sects to sell their myths. Only once in a while does a work emerge that takes the history of Trotskyism out of the realm of mythology and provides us with the elements we need to reconstruct the actual experience of Trotskyist militants in a given time and place. In this sense, this brief work has no other purpose than to provide a general overview of international experiences linked to Trotskyism in the second half of the 20th century in order to advance in a circumstantial understanding of its history and development.