Demagogues and dictators: what is Bonapartism? The deepening crisis of capitalism is causing immense political instability across the world. In this context, a rise in the number of ‘authoritarian’ and ‘populist’ governments has provoked much discussion over the rise of ‘strongman’ politics. But what exactly does this mean? In this article, Ben Gliniecki considers the nature of the capitalist state and the concept of ‘Bonapartism’, as developed by Marx, in order to answer this question and provide a perspective for the impact of the class struggle on politics today.
Marxism under attack after the 1905 revolution: Lenin fights back This week in Lenin in a Year, we look at one of Lenin’s less well known writings, a major polemic against a trend that Marxists usually refer to as ‘ultraleftism’. The Faction of Supporters of Otzovism and God-Building was written in 1909, and it took up key questions of Marxist tactics and philosophy that an unprincipled ultraleft clique within the Bolshevik faction was seeking to revise.
Lenin in a Year: In Defence of Materialism by Alan Woods Last week in Lenin in a Year, we delved into an important text that Lenin wrote amidst the 1905 Revolution: Two Tactics of the Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The revolution, however, went down to defeat. In the wake of the counter-revolution, all kinds of pessimism and mysticism swept Russia. These moods even infected layers of the Bolsheviks, reflected in attempts to revise Marxist philosophy. This week we republish Alan Woods’ excellent introduction to Lenin’s 1908 work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in which Lenin launched a strident defence of dialectical materialism.
