1. Instead of “decay,” words like “breakdown” and “collapse” have been used for the long-term crisis. But since these can imply that the system can end without a proletarian revolution, we use “decay.”
2. Grundrisse, p. 750.
3. Preface to the Critique of Political Economy.
4. Grundrisse, p. 651.
5. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 3.
6. Engels, “Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfs 1891”, in Marx and Engels, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 22, Berlin 1963, p. 232.
7. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Part IV.3.
8. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 3.
9. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 749-750. Note the casual assumption in this passage that capital and wage labor are one and the same relation. Marx’s explicit statements on this have already been cited in Chapter 1, but the point has been so obscured that it deserves repeating.
10. Capital, Volume III, Chapter 15, Part 3 (p. 259).
11. For example, Steve Zeluck, “On the Theory of the Monopoly Stage of Capitalism,” Against the Current, Fall 1980.
12. Alejandro Dabat, “La nivelacion de la tasa de ganancia en el capitalismo contemporaneo,” Debate, May-June 1979.
13. Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 25 (p. 627).
14. Capital, Vol. III, Chapter 27 (pp. 436, 438).
15. Capital, Vol. III, Chapter 27 (pp. 436-7). Likewise: “the capitalist exists in a dual form – juridically and economically,” Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. III, p. 458.
16. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 3.
17. For example, Ted Grant (the leader of the British Militant tendency), The Marxist Theory of the State – A Reply to Tony Cliff (1973).
18. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 9, pp. 245-6.
20. A textual analysis of Marx making clear that this was his view can be found in Paresh Chattopadhyay, “On the Marxian Category of ‘Competition of Capitals’ and its Relevance for the ‘Postrevolutionary’ Economy, Research in Political Economy, Vol. 10 (1987).
21. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, p. 153.
22. Catherine Samary, “Plan, Market and Democracy; The experience of the so-called socialist countries”, Notebooks for Study and Research No. 7/8 (1988), p. 47.
23. Cliff, Russia, A Marxist Analysis, p. 153; State Capitalism in Russia, p. 212.
24. Bernstein, On the History and Theory of Socialism (1898), cited in Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (1962), p. 221. Other quotations from Bernstein here are from Evolutionary Socialism (originally The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, 1899).
25. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1898-99).
26. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913).
27. Luxemburg, The Crisis in German Social Democracy, known as the “Junius Pamphlet,” (1916-17).
28. Hilferding, Finance Capital (1910)
29. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (1915), pp. 123-4.
30. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism, Chapter 1.
31. Imperialism ..., Chapter 7.
32. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, p. 173.
33. Imperialism ..., Chapter 4.
34. For example, Alexander Erlich in Politics and Society, Fall 1973.
35. “The various branches of industry, which serve as ‘markets’ for one another, do not develop evenly, but outstrip one another, and the more developed industry seeks a foreign market. This does not mean at all ‘the impossibility of the capitalist nation realizing surplus-value’... It merely indicates the lack of proportion in the development of the different industries.” (Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 66.)
36. Imperialism ..., Chapter 1.
37. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Chapter 15, part 3 (p. 256).
38. Bukharin. Imperialism and World Economy, p. 96.
39. For example, by Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol. 2, pp. 63-64.
40. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, pp. 45-6. In the passage above, “overproduction of capital” is not used in Marx’s cyclical sense.
41. Marx, Capital, Vol. III (p. 250).
42. Trotsky, “Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International” (1921), The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 1, p. 215.
43. Israel, the apparent exception to these statements, prospered because it was subsidized by Western imperialism.
44. Quotations are from Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905).
45. Trotsky, “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution,” Writings 1939-40, p. 61.
46. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” April 1917.
47. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918).
48. Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, pp. 80-81.
49. Geoff Hodgson, Trotsky and Fatalistic Marxism (1975), p. 26.
50. Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (1977), p. 258.
51. Lenin, “What is to be Done?”, Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 383-4.
52. The German words mean roughly “trade union only-ism.”
53. Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. 1, Chapter 3, p. 97.
54. Trotsky’s Notebooks 1933-35, Philip Pomper, ed. (1986), p. 84.
55. Lenin, “The Lessons of the Revolution,” Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 302.
56. Lenin, “The Reorganization of the Party,” ibid., Vol. 10, p. 32. Here “Social Democratic” refers to the revolutionary party as it was called before 1917, after which Lenin would have said “Communist.”
57. Luxemburg. Reform or Revolution, Introduction.
58. Cliff, Lenin, Vol. 1, p. 176.
59. Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe (1974), pp. 269-72.
60. See Ian Birchall’s “History of the International Socialists,” International Socialism Nos. 76 and 77 (1975). As an illustration, the original version (1959) of Cliff’s pamphlet on Rosa Luxemburg argued that her non-cadre “conception of the structure of the revolutionary organization ... fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902-4,” a passage that was dropped in the 1968 edition (without mention or explanation).
61. “Theses on Reformism,” Permanent Revolution No. 1 (1983). For our reply see “Workers Power: A Powerless Answer to Reformism,” Proletarian Revolution No. 23 (1985).
62. Spartacist League, “Trade Union Memorandum,” Marxist Bulletin No. 9, Part III (1972).
63. Spartacist pamphlet, Solidarnosc: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers. For the truth, see Chapter 8.
64. Trotsky, “Tasks of the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party,” (1923); in Leon Trotsky Speaks, p. 170.