Groucho Marxism
Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics
Category: Socialism
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Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ulyanov into a upper middle-class family in 1870 in the provincial Russian city of Simbirsk, which has since been renamed Ulaynovsk in his honour. His elder brother was executed by Tsarist forces for revolutionary activity when Lenin was just 17. This event had a huge impact on the young Lenin…
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For Karl Marx, economics was not a subject to be studied for its own sake. He was interested in how it materially affected the lives of people around the world. Marx never published any theory of imperialism, although he did make reference to colonialism. Today, Marxists define imperialism as the state of capitalism that occurs…
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Cuba is currently facing a severe oil shortage and a deep economic crisis. The United States began blocking oil tankers heading to Cuba in February this year, targeting companies such as the Mexican state-owned Pemex and threatening countries with tariffs should they attempt to break the blockade. In March, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the First Secretary of…
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To most people, ‘Stalinism’ refers to the totalitarian, state-driven methods of rule and ideology implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. However, socialists tend to use the term ‘Stalinism’ in a broader sense. For most socialists, ‘Stalinism’ refers to the prevailing ideology of the Soviet Union from 1929 up until…
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This week I attended a ‘people’s budget’ meeting held by Surrey Trades Council which featured talks by representatives from the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC), Your Party, the Green Party of England & Wales, and the UK Labour Party. The TUSC representative spoke first and began by pointing out that continued low economic growth…
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Tankies – hardline Marxist-Leninists who defend the repressive actions of socialist states – often hold leaders such as Mao Zedong in high regard. This sets them apart from the rest of us, who usually think of these people as tyrannical despots. It is difficult to understand why anyone would venerate a leader who masterminded such…
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The Labour council in Liverpool was elected in 1983 against a backdrop of decline that had been going on for 20 years. Beginning in the 1960s, containerisation destroyed thousands of jobs on the docks, up until then Liverpool’s biggest employer. The city’s population then collapsed, from over 700,000 in 1960 to under 500,000 in 1980.…
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The socialist calculation debate was a discourse held in the 1930s and 1940s that centred on how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation in the absence of private ownership of the means of production. The debate was primarily between the ‘Austrian School’, represented by economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who argued against…
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The Cuban Revolution was a left-wing movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The revolution was led by Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who began by launching an armed assault on the Moncada Barracks, a Cuban military post, in 1953. The attack was a failure…
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Former Labour MP Zarah Sultana caused a stir last week by suggesting that we should nationalize the entire economy. Put simply, nationalization is the process of transforming privately owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. On the face of it this seems an entirely…
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Scientific socialism is a term popularized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe their socio-political approach, which aims to apply the scientific method to the analysis of society. It contrasts with utopian socialism by basing itself upon material conditions instead of conceptions and ideas. Thus, scientific socialism takes a materialist approach to the analysis…
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Critics of socialism (or Marxism) love to point out how many people died in socialist countries. Particular examples they like to cite are the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933 which killed around 6 million people, and the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 which killed around 30 million people. These numbers seem shocking, but as any quantitative social…
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There is no doubt that globally, socialism is in decline. At one time around one-third of the world’s population lived under socialist governments, most notably in the republics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Today, socialism is the official form of government in only five countries: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In…
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Rosa Luxemburg led an interesting life. Born Rozalia Luksenburg in 1871 to a Jewish family in Russian-occupied Poland, Luxemburg became a German citizen in 1898. Her opposition to WWI led her to co-found the Spartacus League, an anti-war Marxist revolutionary movement, as a result of which she was imprisoned for most of the war. After…
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