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32Marxism and Homosexual LiberationHistorical Materialism 1-100. forthcoming.The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers’ parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the…Read more
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10La Burocracia Sindical En la Primera Revolución Rusa: De Los “Sindicatos Policiales” de Zubatov a la Asamblea de GaponAstrolabio: Nueva Época 20 1-46. 2018.El surgimiento y consolidación en el seno de la clase obrera de un estrato social —la burocracia sindical— que, aunque tenga su origen en dicha clase, con el tiempo adquiere privilegios e intereses que lo llevan a defender posiciones contrarias a la independencia política de los trabajadores, desarticulándolos políticamente y subordinándolos al Estado burgués, es un fenómeno universal del capitalismo. En este artículo, describiremos los intentos realizados por el zarismo ruso de crear artificial…Read more
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497The First Workers’ Government in History: Karl Marx’s Addenda to Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871Historical Materialism 29 (1): 49-112. 2021.In Marxist circles it is common to refer to Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France for a theoretical analysis of the historical significance of the Paris Commune, and to Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871 for a description of the facts surrounding the insurrection of the Paris workers and its repression by the National Assembly led by Adolphe Thiers. What is less well-known is that Marx himself oversaw the German translation of Lissagaray’s book and made numerous additions …Read more
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321Weltmarkt und Imperialismus: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der klassischen marxistischen ImperialismustheorieHistorical Materialism 15 (3): 242-254. 2007.
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443Vera Zasulich’s Critique of Neo-PopulismHistorical Materialism 23 (4): 93-125. 2015.Vera Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov, a governor of St Petersburg who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, in January 1878, catapulted her to international fame as a revolutionary heroine, a reputation that she put to good use by becoming one of the five ‘founding parents’ of Russian Marxism that created the ‘Group for the Emancipation of Labour’ in 1883. But her act of self-sacrifice also triggered, to her dismay, the institutionalisation of individual terrorist tactics in the Russia…Read more
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425The Populist Interpretation of American History: A Materialist RevisionScience and Society 65 (3). 2001.A materialist criticism of the interpretation of American history offered by Charles A. Beard finds that both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Progressive — or rather Populist — historians can be deduced from their character as intellectual representatives of the old middle class of petty proprietors. This class was especially influential in American history due to the presence of the "frontier," the petit-bourgeois regime of landed property, and the special character of American class co…Read more
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1420'The American Worker' and the Theory of Permanent Revolution: Karl Kautsky on Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?Historical Materialism 11 (4): 79-123. 2003.This article is an introduction to the first English edition of Karl Kautsky's article series "The American Worker" (Karl Kautsky, “Der amerikanische Arbeiter”, Die neue Zeit, 24. 1905-1906, 1. Bd., 1906, H. 21, S. 676-683, H. 22, S. 717-727, H. 23, S. 740-752, H. 24, S. 773-787), which was a Marxist reply to Werner Somart's book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Werner Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1906)
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718Paul Levi and the Origins of the United-Front Policy in the Communist InternationalHistorical Materialism 25 (1): 131-174. 2017.During its first four congresses, held annually under Lenin, the Communist International went through two distinct phases: while the first two congresses focused on programmatic and organisational aspects of the break with Social-Democratic parties, the third congress, meeting after the putsch known as the ‘March Action’ of 1921 in Germany, adopted the slogan ‘To the masses!’, while the fourth codified this new line in the ‘Theses on the Unity of the Proletarian Front’. The arguments put forward…Read more
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51Argentine historiography in general, and the history of the Argentine Left in particular, does not receive the attention it deserves in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. In this article, we attempt to review for the English-reading public three recent contributions to the history of Marxism in Argentina covering the entire historical spectrum from the early history of Argentine socialism to the history of the PCA and, finally, to the history of local Trotsk…Read more
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12Under German Eyes: Germán Avé-Lallemant and the Origins of Marxism in ArgentinaScience and Society 75 (4). 2011.During the late 1880s and early 1890s, German socialist immigrants grouped around a club called Vorwärts played a key role in the consolidation of the first socialist groups in Argentina. In the context of a deep economic and political crisis, Germán Avé-Lallemant (1835-1910) — a mining engineer and land surveyor born in Lübeck, who later served as the Argentine correspondent of Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of German Social Democracy edited by Karl Kautsky — became the main personality…Read more
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18A Strange Mixture of Guevara and TogliattiHistorical Materialism 22 (3-4): 217-250. 2014.This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Pero…Read more
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287New Research on the History of Marxism in ArgentinaHistorical Materialism. Research in Critical Marxist Theory. forthcoming.Argentine historiography in general, and the history of the Argentine Left in particular, does not receive the attention it deserves in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. In this article, we attempt to review for the English-reading public three recent contributions to the history of Marxism in Argentina (Horacio Tarcus's Marx en la Argentina: Sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos, Hernán Camarero's A la conquista de la clase obrera: Los…Read more
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317Archive Marxism and the Union Bureaucracy: Karl Kautsky on Samuel Gompers and the German Free Trade UnionsHistorical Materialism 16 (3): 115-136. 2008.Th is work is a companion piece to "The American Worker," Karl Kautsky's reply to Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906), first published in English in the November 2003 edition of the journal Historial Materialism. In August 1909 Kautsky wrote an article on Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, on the occasion of the latter's first European tour. Th e article was not only a criticism of Gompers’s anti-socialist "pure-and-simple" unio…Read more
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753The Origins of the Transitional ProgrammeHistorical Materialism 26 (4): 87-117. 2018.The 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 uncov…Read more