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Michael Löwy
Michael Löwy, a philosopher and sociologist of Brazilian origin, is a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and of the Fourth International. A Fellow of the IIRE in Amsterdam and former research director of the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), he has written many books, including The Marxism of Che Guevara, Marxism and Liberation Theology, Fatherland or Mother Earth? and The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America.
He is joint author (with Joel Kovel) of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto. He was also one of the organizers of the first International Ecosocialist Meeting, in Paris, in 2007.
IV418 - November 2009
| Fossil fuels and timescales
Michael Lowy comments on important issues facing environmental campaigners, in the light of an important document authored by Daniel Tanuro. - read article...
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16th World Congress - 2010
| Climate change
Daniel Tanuro’s report on climate change [1] is one of the most important documents produced by our movement in recent years. It is an invaluable contribution to the political arming of revolutionary Marxists and to making them capable of facing up to the challenges of the 21st century. - read article...
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IV417 - October 2009
| Marxism / Fourth International
This is the first systematic biography of the main leader and theorist of the Fourth International after 1945, who was, as noted by Tariq Ali in his preface, one of the most creative and independent revolutionary thinkers of our time. - read article...
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IV406 - November 2008
| Review
On Pluto Press’ new edition
What remains from the Communist Manifesto in 2008, one hundred and sixty years after its publication? As David Harvey observes in his brilliant preface to this edition, the present financial crisis corresponds in an astonishing way to the predictions of Marx and Engels: “ the society of the ‘too much’, of ‘overproduction’ and excessive speculation, has plainly broken down and reverted, as it always does’ to a ‘state of momentary barbarism”. - read article...
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IV404 - September 2008
| European Social Forum
Michael Löwy speaks on climate change
Almost a year has passed since the IPCC released its reports on how rapid climate changes are taking us towards a disaster. The reports have made the issue more obvious and less controversial: the conclusion of this is that the climate threat can no longer be ignored. - read article...
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IV403 - August 2008
| Brazil
The military dictatorship stands accused
June 1971; the young Brazilian journalist Luiz Eduardo Merlino, militant of the Fourth International, dies from torture, 23 years old. Now, his partner and sister have decided, despite the official amnesty, to bring the man responsible for this crime, to justice. - read article...
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IV386 - February 2007
| Cuba
Critical Notes on Political Economy
We have been waiting a long time, a very long time, for this book to be published... - read article...
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IV382 - October 2006
| Review
Michael Löwy looks at the new book by Cuban "unaffiliated Trotskyist" Celia Hart. - read article...
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Theory
| Marxism and classical sociology
Despite their undeniable differences, Marx and Weber have much in common in their appraisals of modern capitalism: they share a vision of the capitalist economic system as a universe where “individuals are directed by abstractions,” (Marx), where impersonal relations and objects [Versachlicht] replace personal relations of dependence, and where the accumulation of capital becomes an end in itself and, by and large, irrational. - read article...
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| Permanent Revolution
A decisive break with the mechanical Marxism of the 2nd International
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, as sketched for the first time in his essay Results and Prospects (1906), was one of the most astonishing political breakthroughs in Marxist thinking at the begining of the XXth century. - read article...
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| Trotsky, Lenin, Lukacs
There seems to exist an intimate link between the dialectical method and revolutionary theory: not by chance, the high period of revolutionary thinking in the XXth century, the years 1905-1925, are also those of some of the most interesting attemps to use the hegelo-marxist dialectics as an instrument of knowledge and action. Let me try to illustrate the connexion between dialectics and revolution in the thought of three distinct Marxist figures : Leon D. Trotsky, Vladimir I. Lenin and György Lukacs. - read article...
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Marxism and Religion
| Opiate of the People?
The Marxist view of religion has been greatly over-simplified, typically identified with the well-worn refrain that it’s the "opiate of the people." Michael Löwy challenges this misconception, and presents us with a much more nuanced view of Marxism and religion. - read article...
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IV368 - June 2005
| Opiate of the People?
The Marxist view of religion has been greatly over-simplified, typically identified with the well-worn refrain that it’s the "opiate of the people." Michael Löwy challenges this misconception, and presents us with a much more nuanced view of Marxism and religion. - read article...
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International Committee Reports
| Brazil
February 2005
This letter was sent to the the Brazilian DS at the end of January and subsequently endorsed by the FIs International Committee. - read article...
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IV349 - May 2003
| Fifteenth World Congress
This Congress was the first in the history of the Fourth International to adopt a resolution on ecology. This document, published in draft form in IV nearly two years ago, was debated at length at the FI’s International Executive Committee (IEC) and amended accordingly by the drafting committee designated by the IEC. - read article...
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IV348 - March 2003
| Debate
The ’Fifth International’ is not the "spectre haunting Europe and the world" of which Marx wrote in the ’Communist Manifesto’, but is an idea that is beginning to circulate. - read article...
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IV347 - February 2003
| Review
Che Guevara: in search of a new socialism
From 1959 to 1967, Che’s thought evolved considerably. He distanced himself ever further from his initial illusions concerning Soviet or Soviet-style socialism, that is, from the Stalinist version of Marxism. - read article...
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IV324 - October 2000
| Trotsky Dossier
The theory of permanent revolution is not a metaphysical speculation but an attempt to respond to one of the most dramatic questions of our epoch: how to resolve the appalling social problems suffered by the dependent capitalist countries - colonial and semi-colonial in the language of the time - how can they escape pauperisation, dictatorship, oligarchical regimes, foreign domination? - read article...
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IV291 - July 1997
| Che Guevara
Thirty years later, Che Guevara’s message is still a glowing beacon to those who know that a better world is possible. - read article...
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News from the FI, the militant left and the social movements
 France
February 2010
The decision of the local NPA in the Vaucluse region in France to include a headscarf-wearing candidate on its list for the regional elections has caused a lot of debate in the French media. Here Olivier Besancenot, spokesperson of the NPA, corrects inaccurate reporting of his words. - read
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Fourth International
January 2010
Commemoration meetings for Daniel Bensaïd have taken place or will do so in Paris, Toulouse, Porto Alegre and London. - read
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Mauritius
December 2009
With US military activities growing fast in Africa, including the setting up of Africom, and with the new African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty (known as the Pelindaba Treaty) now in force, the huge base on Diego Garcia becomes a key issue. - read
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 Pakistan
December 2009
Four LPP leaders died in a road accident yesterday in Baluchistan. They were coming back after meetings to organise home-based women workers. Three of them are shown in this photograph, taken at Khanis Pur Murree last year during a socialist school. - read
article...
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Mexico
November 2009
Call for * Day for International Action in Embassies on December the 3rd. * To send International Delegations * To provide economic support - read article... |
ISSN
1294-2495
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