Any serious discussion in a Marxist organization has two aspects.ⁱ It is born of ongoing events and tends to respond to a need for action born from the same events. In this respect, any discussion which is not artificial is inevitably partly pragmatic. But the answer given and the method which determines it become part of the whole of Marxist theory, and in one way or another modify the ideas—and the action—of future generations of Marxists, and even the answers given by the same generation to future questions.

For eighty years, the theory of permanent revolution has been the object of a permanent debate inside the international labour and revolutionary movement.ⁱ A great number of articles and books have been devoted to the discussion. A significant number of revolutions and counter-revolutions have. occurred in the less developed countries of the world in which this theory could be tested in the light of real historical development.

Notre institut a été fondé par Ernest Mandel en 1982 et a été très actif depuis lors. Depuis plus de trois décennies, l'Institut International de Recherche et de Formation (IIRF) organise des cours, des séminaires et des débats destinés aux militants sociaux et politiques du monde entier. Afin de maintenir l'IIRE en tant qu'espace unique d'éducation socialiste, nous avons lancé une campagne de financement.

Council socialism is a social order in which the mass of the population itself decides in a self-governing, self-determining manner what is produced, how production takes places, and how a decisive part of the results of this production is no longer distributed via the market, but according to the principle of satisfying needs.ⁱ 

We mourn the loss of our friend and comrade Arend van de Poel. Arend (1948) passed away on January 4, 2023. He first became politically active in 1966 when he joined protests against the US war in Vietnam. He joined the independent Socialist Youth and some years later was a founding member of the Internationale Kommunisten Bond, the Dutch section of the Fourth International. A comrade remembers Arend in those days; ‘Arend was active in the Amsterdam branch and in the daily leadership. The speed at which he cycled around Amsterdam was legendary.

As the USSR disintegrated in 1990 and 1991, the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International took different views of the impending privatizations. Marxists Against Stalinism brings together powerful contributions from Ernest Mandel and Chris Harman in the long-running debate on the class nature of the USSR.  Chris Harman argued that Soviet Union and the other “socialist” countries were bureaucratic state-capitalisms.