The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a general introduction to the fundamental ideas of historical materialism – the Marxist theory of human history and society.

For Marxists the study of human history is inseparable from the study of society.

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question is a collection of essays written over the last 24 years by Michael Löwy, director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. The book was published under the auspices of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education, founded by Ernest Mandel and other leaders of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

Lenin’s purpose in writing this work was, as he stated at the beginning of chapter 1, to clearly demonstrate the “unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism” on the question of the state and the proletarian revolution then prevailing in the international socialist movement by re-establishing what Marx and Engels themselves had written on this subject. Most of the book therefore takes the form of an extended commentary, with extensive quotations, on the writings of Marx and Engels. It then deals with the person “who is chiefly responsible for these distortions”, namely, Karl Kautsky, the editor of Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the best-known leader of the Second International, the international association of socialist parties founded in Paris in 1889.

The Communist Manifestois the most famous of all documents produced by the socialist movement. It appeared in February 1848, on the eve of an explosion of popular revolutionary struggles in France and Germany – revolutionary mass movements that the Manifesto had foreseen.

In my opinion, Greg Ogle’s review of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham’s book The End of Capitalism in GLW #256 concedes far too much to the drivel of these “post-modernists”. For example: He writes, “many on the left abandoned such economic reduction long ago [i.e., the Marxist understanding that “society is structured by class, of people and institutions being constrained (if not positively formed) by material conditions which ultimately relate to a particular production dynamic”], not least because of powerful feminist criticism that gender oppression could not be reduced to class.”

This is a time of major upheavals in the world socialist movement. The developments unleashed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power are leading to possibly the biggest shake-up in the socialist movement since the victory of Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Communist party. We are confronted with the possibility of the definitive exposure and defeat of Stalinism, which has shackled the Communist movement since the death of Lenin.