English

Articles

• Revolution and counter-revolution in Spain
  19 September 2010

  FOR the new generations moving into political life a study of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 contains valuable lessons. This book, hammered out in time with the dramatic events it describes, stands in direct line with the great writings of Marx and Engels on the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. No doubt later historical research has been able to uncover from the record a more detailed account of the facts, and the reports of (…)

• The legacy of Charles Darwin - L’héritage de Charles Darwin
  21 April 2015, by Robert Paris

  The legacy of Charles Darwin
  150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species
  Roy Farrar, from The Socialist (weekly paper of CWI England and Wales)
  Charles Darwin’s theory of ’natural selection’ changed the way that we look at ourselves. It contradicted the idea of an outside ’intelligent designer’, so it met a reaction from the religious establishment that still exists in part today. Some schools, particularly in the US, are teaching evolution as ’one point of view’ (…)

• Albert Einstein, Relativity, The Special and General Theory
  4 August 2021, by Robert Paris

  Albert Einstein, Relativity, The Special and General Theory
  Part I
  The Special Theory of Relativity
  Physical Meaning of Geometrical Propositions
  In your schooldays most of you who read this book made acquaintance with the noble building of Euclid’s geometry, and you remember — perhaps with more respect than love — the magnificent structure, on the lofty staircase of which you were chased about for uncounted hours by conscientious teachers. By reason of our past experience, you (…)

• Indochina and revolution
  22 May 2008, by Robert Paris

  On Vietnam
  The text below is extracted from Sur le Vietnam, a series of articles published in Informations et Correspondences ouvrières from the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, at the height of the movement against the Vietnam war in Europe and North America. Whilst this description as a whole has not hitherto appeared in English, the final chapter, The Saigon Insurrection of 23 September 1945, was the only account of the events available in Britain for many years, having been first (…)

• Claude Lévi-Strauss 1962 History and Dialectic
  12 August 2019, by Robert Paris

  In the course of this work I have allowed myself, not without ulterior motive, to borrow a certain amount of Sartre’s vocabulary. I wanted to lead the reader to face a problem, the discussion of which will serve to introduce my conclusion. The problem is to what extent thought that can and will be both anecdotal and geometrical may yet be called dialectical. The savage mind totalizes. It claims indeed to go very much further in this direction than Sartre allows dialectical reason, for, on (…)

• The State and Revolution, Lenine
  14 May 2008

  Lenine (Septembre 1917)
  CLASS SOCIETY AND THE STATE
  1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
  What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and (…)

• The dialectic of geology
  17 June 2008

  from " Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science"
  By Alan Woods and Ted Grant
  There is an English saying, "as solid as the ground under our feet." This comforting idea, however, is very far from the truth. The earth beneath our feet is not as solid as it seems. The rocks, the mountain ranges, the continents themselves, are in a continuous state of movement and change, the exact nature of which has only begun to be understood in the latter half of this century. Geology is the science (…)

• Religion : its social roots and role
  2 June 2008, by Robert Paris

  Definitions of religion, like definitions of the state, generally tell us more about the social and political allegiances of the author of a given definition than about the true nature of religion or the state. Loyalties – that is, class interests and class outlook – are transferred into definitions; especially is this true of religion. Typical of such definitions is a theologian’s formula for Christianity as ‘the synthesis of the highest aspirations of man’. The fact that definitions are (…)

• Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
  4 December 2021

  C.L.R. James 1947
  Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
  Mankind has obviously reached the end of something. The crisis is absolute. Bourgeois civilisation is falling apart, and even while it collapses, devotes its main energies to the preparation of further holocausts. Not remote states on the periphery but regimes contending for world power achieve the most advanced stages of barbarism known to history. What civilised states have ever approached Nazi Germany and Stalinist (…)

• Hegel’s philosophy and science
  10 February 2009

  Hegel’s philosophy and science
  Friday 1 January 2010
  Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
  Analytical Table of Contents Preliminary
  § 192 Nature has presented itself as the idea in the form of otherness. § 193 Hence nature exhibits no freedom in its existence, but only necessity and contingency. § 194 Nature is to be viewed as a system of stages, in which one stage necessarily arises from the other. § 195 Nature is, in itself a living whole. § 196 The idea as nature can be named mathematics, (…)