Marxist Archive

Miscellaneous

What is Revolutionary Leadership? (html 63k)

This article, written by Cliff Slaughter, was originally published nearly forty years ago in the October-November 1961 issue of Labour Review, theoretical organ of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). It was reprinted, along with several others from the same journal, by the Spartacist group in 1964. Comrade Slaughter, who went on to pursue a long and unpleasant career as a cynical ideologue for the SLL and its megalomaniacal founder/leader, Gerry Healy, today no longer even claims to stand in the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition. Yet his article remains a valuable statement of the necessity to create a conscious Marxist leadership, organized in a revolutionary party, capable of struggling for the leadership of the working class against the reformist and centrist purveyors of false (or bourgeois) consciousness.

The Theory of State Capitalism -- The Clock Without a Spring (html 51k)

This document, by Ken Tarbuck, was originally published in the Winter 1969-70 issue of Marxist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1

Introduction to Max Shachtman's The Fight For Socialism (1946) (html 6k)

Max Shachtman’s small book, The Fight For Socialism: The Principles and Program of the Workers Party, New International Publishing Co, New York, 1946, is a useful introduction for those new to revolutionary politics, despite its deficiencies.

The introduction provided here was stitched into copies of the book sold by Spartacist in the mid-1960s.

The People’s Front: The New Betrayal (html split into chapters)

Pamphlet by James Burnham, published by Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1937

What is a "Mass Paper"?

Letter to the Bolshevik-Leninist Group by Leon Trotsky, 30 November 1935, published in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-36)

Brilliant Tactics … But Where Do They Lead? The Campaign against the Springbok Tour

A leaflet published on 29 August 1981 during a period of sharp social struggle in New Zealand around sporting ties to apartheid-ruled South Africa and a tour of New Zealand by the white South African Springbok team. Arguing to introduce a class struggle perspective to the anti-tour movement, it was published by the Labour Left, a formation in the Labour Party which included militants from a variety of leftist traditions, among them three comrades who later became founding members of the International Bolshevik Tendency.