This is the fourth and concluding part of a series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the third part of what is now a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the second of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the first of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

I should say first of all that this talk I’m going to give, hasn’t been discussed through Red Ant formally as an organisation, so it’s not the position of Red Ant per se; it’s more my own views – although some aspects of what I’m going to say have been reflected in articles published on the Red Ant website.

The following in-depth, 8000 word article was originally published in 2016. However, it has become as relevant as ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 27, 2022.

Red Ant republishes it here to contribute to the debate around the nature of the Russian invasion, of Russia itself and its relationship with the bloc of rich, imperialist countries like the USA, UK, Germany and Australia.

Almost 100 years after it was written, Lenin’s classic Marxist theory of imperialism, principally articulated in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,^[1] remains the best framework to understand capitalism’s international political economy. Subsequent capitalist development shows the key aspects of Lenin’s thesis to be correct.

In Sept 2010 UN General Assembly was devoted to a discussion on ending global poverty, to the fulfilment of the socalled Millennium Goals first adopted in the year 2000. A decade after the adoption of these goals, UN agencies reported that while 830 million people lived on the brink of starvation when the goals were adopted a decade ago, this number had soared to over 1 billion and that in 2010 almost the same number were forced to live on less than a dollar a day.

Waving a copy of this book, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the 772 delegates assembled on November 21, 2009, for the opening session of the First Extraordinary Congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) that he agreed with the book’s central message, i.e., that it was necessary “to create a new revolutionary state from below that is a real mechanism for the construction of socialism of the 21^st century”. Chavez recommended that the delegates read Lenin’s book as a theoretical guide for how to accomplish this task.

The chapters of this pamphlet first appeared as individual articles in the newspaper Direct Action over a period of two and a half years, beginning with the paper’s first issue, in June 2008.

The aim of each article was to present an introductory explanation of some aspect of Marxism. In nearly every case, the space available was limited to 700 words, so there was no opportunity to go into great detail. Paradoxically, perhaps, this limitation had its advantages, limiting digressions and forcing a focus on the topic at hand.