Socrates – Question everything
Plato – The Platonic world
Aristotle – All knowledge comes from the senses
Xenophon – “From the beginning the gods did not reveal all things to us, yet through searching we may learn and know things better. But as for certain Truth, no man has known it, nor shall he know it, neither of the Gods nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter the Final Truth he himself would not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.”
Francis Bacon (1561-1627) – Lord Chancellor under James I; His biography of Henry VIII insisted on a causal explanation of history rather than a divine one
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – The Leviathan (1651); concept of the social contract; supported the absolute power of monarchs
John Locke (1632-1704) – ‘tabula rasa’; Treatise on Civil Government (1690); Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) – argument against innate ideas was taken as a blow against religion
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) – Opposed dualism
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – theory of gravity
Voltaire, [François-Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) – Separation of church & state
David Hume (1711-76) – A Treatise of Human Nature (1740); scepticism: he saw the human mind divided between impressions & ideas. Our ideas represent, resemble, or are caused by external objects. We have no way of standing outside our perceptions, & so we are unable to carry out a comparison between them & the real object which they are supposed to represent.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” (Discourse on Inequality, 1754)
“Man is or was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.” Opening lines of The Social Contract (1762)
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) – co-founder of the first encyclopedia
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-71) – denied the existence of free-will
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Tom Paine (1737-1809) – Common Sense (1776); The Rights of Man (1791)
Hegel (1770-1831) – Science of Logic (1812-16) ; Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820); History of Philosophy (1819-31); the dialectic
Ricardo (1772-1823) – Comparative advantage; Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)
Simondi de Sismondi (1773-1842) – ‘Father’ of underconsumption theory (‘general gluts’)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) – Utilitarianism (1861)
Max Stirner (1806-1856) – The Ego & It’s Own (1844)
Proudhon (1803-1865) – Anarchist; The Philosophy of Poverty (1840); “Property is theft”
Blanqui (1805-1881) – Use of force by a small group
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) – collective/social anarchist
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Engels(1820-1895)
Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)
“The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production.”
“Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, & that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, & that in doing so destroys its own home market.”
The Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State (1884)
“The state has not existed for all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state & state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of free & equal association of producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel & the bronze axe.”
At Marx’s funeral: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that humankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.”
Kropotkin (1842-1921) – Anarcho-communist; Mutual Aid (1902)
Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) – Argued Marxism was to be understood as a “critical theory“, in the sense that it sees no truths as everlasting; Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History (1896)
Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) – Reformist; Evolutionary Socialism (1899)
“The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing, the movement is everything”
Eugene Bohm-Bawerk (1851-1914) – Austrian School economist; Karl Marx and the Close of his System (1896)
Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) – Social Democrat
Eugene Debs (1855-1926) – Socialist Party of America
Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) – Critical of Lenin as didn’t believe Russia could skip capitalism & go straight to communism; “Marxism is a complete, integral world outlook, cast from a single sheet of steel”.
Herman Gorter (1864-1927) – The World Revolution (1923)
Mikhail Tugan-Baronovsky (1865-1919) – No limit to capitalism as long as proper relationship between Dept I & II
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
What the Friends of the People Are (1894)
“One of the favourite hobby-horses of the subjective philosopher is the idea of the conflict between determinism & morality, between historical necessity & the significance of the individual. He has filled reams of paper on the subject & has uttered an infinite amount of sentimental, philistine nonsense in order to settle this conflict in favour of morality & the role of the individual. The idea of determinism, which postulates that human acts are necessitated & rejects the absurd tale about free will, in no way destroys man’s reason or consciousness, or appraisal of his actions. Quite the contrary, only the deterministic view makes a strict & correct appraisal possible instead of attributing everything you please to free will. Similarly, the idea of historical necessity does not in the least undermine the role of the individual in history: all history is made up of the actions of individuals, who are undoubtedly active figures. The real question that arises in appraising the social activity of an individual is: what conditions ensure the success of his actions, what guarantee is there that these actions will not remain an isolated act lost in a welter of contrary acts?”
The Economic Content of Narodism (1895)
“Freedom is the appreciation of necessity, far from assuming fatalism, determinism in fact provides a basis for reasonable action”
What is to be done? (1902)
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)
The Attitude Towards Bourgeois Parties (1907)
“They [the Mensheviks] forgot that anybody who tackles partial problems without having previously settled general problems, will inevitably and at every step “come up against” those general problems without himself realising it. To come up against them blindly in every individual case means to doom one’s politics to the worst vacillation and lack of principle.”
Materialism & Empirio-Criticism (1908)
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
April Theses (1917)
The State & Revolution (1917)
The Impending Catastrophe & How to Combat it (1917)
“For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.”
Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
“The splitting of a single whole & the cognition of its contradictory parts…is the essence of dialectics” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38
“The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 42 (1922)
“Ideas become a power when they grip the people” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26
Better Fewer, But Better (1923)
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
Social Reform or Revolution (1900)
“Between social reform & revolution there exists for the social democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means, the social revolution, its aim.”
“Socialist theory up to now declared that the point of departure for a transformation to socialism would be a general & catastrophic crisis.”
“The scientific basis of socialism rests on three principle results of capitalist development:
1. The growing anarchy of capitalist economy
2. Progressive socialisation of the production process
3. The increased organisation & consciousness of the working class, which constitutes the active factor in revolution”
“If it is true that crises appear as a result of the contradiction existing between the capacity of extension, the tendency of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity of the market, credit is precisely the specific means that makes this contradiction break out as often as possible. To begin with, it increases disproportionately the capacity of the extension of production and thus constitutes an inner motive force that is constantly pushing production to exceed the limits of the market. But credit strikes from two sides. After having provoked overproduction, credit destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created. At the first symptoms of the crisis, credit melts away. It abandons exchange where it would still be found indispensable, and appearing instead ineffective and useless, there where some exchange still continues, it reduces to a minimum the consumption capacity of the market.”
“The production relations of capitalist society approach more & more the production relations of socialist society. But on the other hand its political & juridical relations established between capitalist society & socialist society a steadily rising wall. This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened & consolidated by the development of social reforms & the course of democracy. Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, can break down this wall.”
“The trade union struggle & parliamentary practice are considered to be means of guiding & educating the proletariat in preparation for the task of taking power.”
“It is not true that socialism will arise automatically from the daily struggle of the working class. Socialism will be a consequence of:
1. The growing contradictions of the capitalist economy, &
2. The comprehension of the working class of the unavoidability of the suppression of these contradictions through a social transformation.
When, in the manner of revisionism, the first condition is denied & the second rejected, the labour movement finds itself reduced to a simple co-operative & reformist movement. We move here in a straight line toward the total abandonment of the class viewpoint.”
“In the ‘unhindered’ advance of capitalist production lurks a threat to capitalism that is much graver than crises. It is the threat of the constant fall in the profit rate, resulting not from the contradiction between production & exchange, but from the growth of the productivity of labour itself. The falling profit rate has the extremely dangerous tendency of rendering impossible any enterprise for small & middle-sized capitals. It thus limits the new formation, & therefore the extension of the placements of capital.”
“…people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of & in contradistinction to the conquest of political power & social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer & slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.”
“…the conquest of a parliamentary reformist majority is a calculation which, entirely in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism, preoccupies itself with one side – the formal side – of democracy, but does not take into account the other side, its real content. All in all, parliamentarianism is not a directly socialist element impregnating gradually the whole capitalist society. It is, on the contrary, a specific form of the bourgeois class state, helping to ripen & develop the existing class antagonisms of capitalism.”
“…only through the exercise of democratic rights in the struggle for democracy can the proletariat become aware of its class interests & its historic task.”
“The theory of capitalist collapse is the cornerstone of scientific socialism.”
“Without the collapse of capitalism the expropriation of the capitalist class is impossible.”
Organisational Question of Social Democracy (1904)
Rosa Luxemburg’s reply to Lenin’s What is to be Done?
“The central Committee would be the only thinking element in the party. All other groupings would be its executive limbs”
“Now the two principles on which Lenin’s centralism rests are precisely these:
1. The blind subordination, in the smallest detail, to the party centre, which alone thinks, guides, & decides for all
2. The rigorous separation of the organised nucleus of revolutionaries from its social revolutionary surroundings”
“In general, the tactical policy of the social democracy is not something that may be ‘invented’. It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.”
“Let us not forget that the revolution soon to break out in Russia will be a bourgeois & not a proletarian revolution.”
“The working class demands the right to make its mistakes & learn in the dialectic of history.”
“Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
The Crisis in German Social Democracy (The Junius Pamphlet), 1915
“The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of maturity to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat; it is in the same measure its driving force & its cause as well as its product & effect. And although we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his own shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or retard it.”
“Those who don’t move, don’t notice their chains.”
Martov (1873-1923) – Leader of the Mensheviks
Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) – Bolshevik until expelled in 1909; Empirio-Monism (1904-06)
Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) – Council Communist
Otto Rühle (1874-1943) – Anti-Bolshevik; The Revolution is Not a Party Affair (1920)
Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) – Finance Capital (1910)
Josef Stalin (1879-1953) – Born Josef Dzhugashvili; Foundations of Leninism (1924)
Trotsky (1879-1940) Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein
History of the Russian Revolution (1930)
The Permanent Revolution (1931)
Their Morals and Ours (1936)
“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.”
The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
Stalinism & Bolshevism (1937)
Trotsky’s Notebooks
“Dialectics is the logic of development. It examines the world – completely & without exception – not as the result of creation, of a sudden beginning, the realisation of a plan, but as a result of motion, of transformation. Everything that is became the way it is as a result of law-like development…the organic world emerged from the inorganic, consciousness is a capacity of living organisms depending upon organs that originated through evolution…In other words “the soul” of evolution (of dialectics) leads in the last analysis to matter. The evolutionary point of view carried to a logical conclusion leaves no room for either idealism or dualism, or for the other species of eclecticism.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Ludwig Von Mises (1881-1973) – Right-wing libertarian of the Austrian School who thinks gold should be the basis of money; Socialism (1922); Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949)
Henryk Grossman (1881-1950) – The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929) mathematically showed that the reproduction schema breakdown
Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) – Communism and its Tactics (1921-23)
Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936) – Bolshevik & leader of the Communist International, executed by Stalin
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) – The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money (1936)
Georg Lukács (1885-1971) – History & Class Consciousness (1923), Lenin (1924)
“The workers’ council spells the political & economic defeat of reification.”
“The Soviet [Commune] system always establishes the indivisible unity of economics & politics, by relating the concrete existence of men – their immediate daily interests, etc. – to the essential questions of society as a whole”
“the unions tend to take on the task of atomising & depoliticising the movement & concealing its relation to the totality,” whereas reformist parties “perform the task of establishing the reification in the consciousness of the proletariat both ideologically & on the level of organisation.”
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) – Bolshevik executed by Stalin; The ABC of Communism (1919)
Karl Korsch (1889-1961) – Communism & Philosophy (1923)
Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) – Equated the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ with the ‘dictatorship of the party’
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) – Hegemony & consciousness; Prison Notebooks (1929-35)
Mao Zedong (1893-1976) – Leader of the Chinese Revolution
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1973) – Frankfurt School; Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) – Showed that marginalism has its own ‘transformation problem’ in the Cambridge Capital Controversy (against Paul Samuelson); The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960)
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) – The Road to Serfdom (1944)
Michael Kalecki (1899-1970) – Essentially a Keynesian
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) – USSR was ‘state capitalism’
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) – Frankfurt School; supporter of the dialectic
Paul Mattick (1904-1981) – Council Communist; Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory (1981)
John-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) – Existentialism
Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987) – Trotsky’s secretary; Marxist-Humanism; USSR was ‘state capitalism’; Marxism & Freedom (1957)
Paul Sweezy (1910-2004) – Monthly Review journal; ‘underconsumptionist’; Theory of Capitalist Development (1946); Monopoly Capital (1966)
Hal Draper (1914-1990) – The Two Souls of Socialism (1966)
Tony Cliff (1917-2000) – founder of the SWP (in Britain); USSR was ‘state capitalism’
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990) – Anti-humanist; Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)
Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) – Ecologist; Communitarianism
John Rawls (1921-2002) – A Theory of Justice (1971); “veil of ignorance”
Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) – Long waves (falling rate of profit)
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) – Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972)
Arrigo Cervetto (1927-1995) – Theses of 1957; Class Struggles & the Revolutionary Party (1964)
Cyril Smith (1928-2008) – Marx at the Millennium (1996)
Noam Chomsky (1928- ) – Anarchist
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) – Post modernist/structuralist; The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970)
Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) – Frankfurt School
Guy Debord (1931-1994) – Situationist; The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Antonio Negri (1933-2023) – Autonomism; Empire (2000)
David Harvey (1935- ) – Limits to Capital (1982)
Joel Kovel (1936-2018) – The Enemy of Nature (2002)
Robert Nozick (1938-2002) – Right-wing libertarian; Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Ian Steedman (1941- ) – ‘Neo-Ricardian’ who rejected Marx’s theory of value; Marx After Sraffa (1977)
Sam Williams – http://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/
Chris Harman (1942-2009) – SWP; Economics of the Madhouse (1995)
Anwar Shaikh (1945- ) – Capitalism: Competition, Conflict & Crisis (2016)
John Holloway (1947- ) – Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)
Loren Goldner (1947-2024) – Fictitious Capital & the Transition Out of Capitalism (2005)
John N. Gray (1948- ) – Critical of humanism; Straw Dogs (2002)
John Bellamy Foster (1953- ) – Monthly Review School; Marx’s Ecology (2000); Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism (2011)
Andrew Kliman (1955- ) – Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital” (2006) – Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s labour theory of value; The Failure of Capitalist Production (2011)
John Rees (1957- ) – Counterfire (ex-SWP)
The Algebra of Revolution (1998)
“The speed with which the connections between partial struggles & partial gains in class consciousness can generalise into more complete revolutionary consciousness depends, not exclusively but nevertheless to an important degree, on the depth of the economic crisis. The more ruthlessly the capitalist class is obliged to attack the wages & conditions of the working class, the more likely it is that the contradictions at the heart of the productive process will reveal the true nature of capitalist society to those who have to sell their labour-power.”
Strategy & Tactics (2011)