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The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted
In this concise volume, noted scholar and economist Michael A. Lebowitz considers the legacy of twentieth century socialist societies, or what some have termed “real socialism.” While these societies...
View ArticleAn Alternative Worth Struggling For
“We are sinking in the Devil’s excrement,” wrote a close observer of Venezuela’s adventures in oil. Was Venezuela’s deep culture of corruption, crime, and clientalism imaginable in the absence of the...
View ArticleThe Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?
“If we believe in people, if we believe that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development,” our choice is clear: socialism or barbarism.” These concluding lines from...
View ArticleExploring the Dialectic of the Bolivarian Revolution
Iain Bruce, The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the 21st Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 240 pages, $27.90, paperback. “When Chávez speaks, we listen. But we don’t listen to those around him.”...
View ArticleThe Unifying Element in All Struggles Against Capital Is the Right of...
[In my] examination of struggle…from the side of workers.… I constantly came back to the Marxist concept of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstance and human activity or...
View ArticleWhat Makes the Working Class a Revolutionary Subject?
Those who conclude that the working class is not a revolutionary subject because capitalism has changed the working class reveal that they do not understand the ABCs of Marxism. The working class makes...
View ArticleProposing a Path to Socialism: Two Papers for Hugo Chávez
Everyone understands that it is impossible to achieve the vision of socialism for the twenty-first century in one giant leap forward. It is not simply a matter of changing property ownership. This is...
View ArticleIf You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?
“Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life,” noted Frederick Engels at Marx’s graveside, “was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of...
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The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now
Michael A. Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society's goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely,...
View ArticleWhat Is Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
Often the best way to begin to understand something is to consider what it is not. Socialism for the twenty-first century is not a society in which people sell their ability to work and are directed...
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Protagonism and Productivity
President Chávez, in line with Marx, identified revolutionary praxis as the key link between human development and practice: “We have to practice socialism…and this practice will create us, ourselves,...
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Between Capitalism and Community
Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx’s analysis....
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What Every Child Should Know about Marx’s Theory of Value
Michael Lebowitz expounds on the simple truths found in Marx’s theory of value—truths that, nonetheless, have been obscured by decades of incomplete theorizing that has failed to make key distinctions...
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