Rick Kuhn | |
---|---|
Born | 18 September 1955 |
Nationality | Australian |
Academic career | |
Institution | Australian National University |
Field | Politics and international relations |
School or tradition | Marxian economics |
Influences | Marx · Engels · Lenin · Luxemburg · Trotsky · Cliff · Grossman · Lukács |
Awards | Deutscher Memorial Prize |
Rick Kuhn (born 18 September 1955) is an Australian Marxian economist, political analyst and reader at the Australian National University in Canberra. [1] [2] He is best known for his biographical study on Henryk Grossman, for which he won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2007. [3] Chris Harman of the British Socialist Workers Party and editor of International Socialism described the biography as "a valuable addition to our theoretical armour." [4] Kuhn is of Jewish origin and is a member of Jews Against Oppression and Occupation. [5] He was the convenor of ACTNOW, the umbrella anti-war organisation in Canberra, formed in response to the wars on Afghanistan [6] and Iraq. [7] He is also a long-term member of the Trotskyist organisation Socialist Alternative [8] and was a founding editor of the online journal Marxist Interventions. [9] Kuhn has published articles in Socialist Alternative, [5] International Socialist Review, [10] Socialist Worker , [11] New Matilda , [12] Monthly Review , [13] ZNet , [14] The Canberra Times [15] and various academic journals and edited collections. [16]
[ by whom? ]
Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishment of communism. Lenin's ideological contributions to the Marxist ideology relate to his theories on the party, imperialism, the state, and revolution. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism.
Henryk Grossman was a Polish economist, historian, and Marxist revolutionary active in both Poland and Germany.
Socialist Alternative (SA) is a Trotskyist organisation in Australia. As a revolutionary socialist group, it describes itself as aiming to organise collective struggles against oppression and inequality while promoting the need for a revolutionary movement that could one day overthrow capitalism. Its members have organised numerous campaigns and protests around LGBT rights, climate change, racism, refugee rights and more. The organisation also intervenes in the trade union and student union movements. It has branches and student clubs in most major Australian cities and publishes the fortnightly newspaper Red Flag.
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a Marxist–Leninist organization in the United States. FRSO formed in 1985 amid the collapse of the Maoist-oriented New Communist movement that emerged in the 1970s. The FRSO's component groups believed that ultraleftism was the US New Communist movement's main error. Merging under the FRSO banner, these groups hoped to consolidate the movement's remnants in a single organization and move beyond the sectarianism that marked the previous decades.
The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was a Marxist socialist political party in the North German Confederation during unification.
Solidarity is a Trotskyist organisation in Australia. The group is a member of the International Socialist Tendency and has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth. The organisation was formed in 2008 from a merger between groups emerging from the International Socialist tradition: the International Socialist Organisation, Socialist Action Group and Solidarity.
The Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize is an annual prize given in honour of historian Isaac Deutscher and his wife Tamara Deutscher for a new book published in English "which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition." It has been ongoing since 1969.
The Jewish Social Democratic Party in Galicia was a political party in Galicia and later also Bukovina, established in a split from the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (PPSD) in 1905. The party made its first public appearance on May 1, 1905, with separate May Day rallies in Kraków, Lemberg, Tarnów and Przemyśl. However, as the new party stressed that it was not a competitor of the existing Social Democratic parties, they later joined the PPSD celebrations.
Tom O'Lincoln was an American Marxist historian, author and one of the founders of the International Socialist Tendency in Australia. He attended UC Berkeley in 1966 and joined the International Socialists who had participated in the Free Speech Movement two years earlier. He has produced first-hand accounts of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Philippines after the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos, the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the upheavals against Suharto in Indonesia. He was a member of the Trotskyist organisation Socialist Alternative, as well as its electoral alliance party Victorian Socialists, and an editor of the online journal Marxist Interventions.
Liz Ross is a long-term socialist activist and author based in Melbourne, Australia. She has campaigned for Women's Rights and Gay Liberation since 1972 and was a union delegate in the Department of Social Security for ten years during the Hawke era. Notably, she has contributed detailed accounts of industrial struggle in Australia, with militant workers in both defunct the Builders Labourers Federation and the Royal Australian Nurses' Federation. She is also a member of the Trotskyist organisation Socialist Alternative, as well as its electoral alliance party Victorian Socialists and a founding and life member of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
Tom Bramble is a socialist activist, author and retired academic based in Queensland, Australia. He taught Industrial Relations at the University of Queensland for many years and has authored numerous books and articles on the Australian labour movement. He is a member of Socialist Alternative.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
Types of socialism include a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and organizational self-management of enterprises as well as the political theories and movements associated with socialism. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity in which surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole. There are many varieties of socialism and no single definition encapsulates all of them, but social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary, how far society should intervene, and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a far-left political party in the United Kingdom. Founded as the Socialist Review Group by supporters of Tony Cliff in 1950, it became the International Socialists in 1962 and the SWP in 1977. The party considers itself to be Trotskyist. Cliff and his followers criticised the Soviet Union and its satellites, calling them state capitalist rather than socialist countries.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) frames its ideology as Marxism adapted to the historical context of China, often expressing it as socialism with Chinese characteristics. Major ideological contributions of the CCP's leadership are viewed as "Thought" or "Theory," with "Thought" carrying greater weight. Influential concepts include Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and Xi Jinping Thought. Other important concepts include the socialist market economy, Jiang Zemin's idea of the Three Represents, and Hu Jintao's Scientific Outlook on Development.
The socialist mode of production, or simply (Marxist) socialism or communism as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the terms communism and socialism interchangeably, is a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that emerge from capitalism in the schema of historical materialism within Marxist theory. The Marxist definition of socialism is that of production for use-value, therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning. According to Marx, distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his needs"; Soviet models often distributed products based on the principle of "to each according to his contribution". The social relations of socialism are characterized by the proletariat effectively controlling the means of production, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management. Surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole.
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the death of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with Instrumental Marxism.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Crisis theory, concerning the causes and consequences of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system, is associated with Marxian critique of political economy, and was further popularised through Marxist economics.