Journal

The University of the Poor is now publishing an online journal.

The mission of the University of the Poor is to unite and develop leaders committed to the unity of the poor and dispossessed across all lines of division so as to build a broad-based and powerful movement to end poverty. The role the University of the Poor Journal is to develop collaborative research, robust debate, and resources to advance that mission.

The Journal will include articles on theoretical and political questions presenting themselves as the revolutionary movement develops under new conditions. It will consider the strategic questions facing our class and carry articles analyzing current political developments in the U.S. and internationally. The Journal hopes to become a center for discussion of various strategic projections in the revolutionary movement.

We invite all who agree with the general principles in the University of the Poor concept paper to contact us and consider contributing to the Journal.

The Revolutionary Process Today: Science and Doctrine

October 10, 2017

By Lenny Brody

As the crisis of international capitalism continues to develop, and a growing number of countries enter into political crisis, revolutionaries around the world turn to the body of knowledge known as Marxism for guidance in the fight of the working class. However, the confusion and merger of various aspects of Marxism has led to a disorientation of many revolutionaries. Some “Marxists” live in a world of abstractions, with little connection to the revolutionary process. Other “Marxists” run after every protest and expression of the “class struggle” without any strategic conception of the general motion and goals of the revolutionary process.

Historical Materialism and Doctrine

Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism. When the dialectical materialist method is applied to the study of society the result is the science of society known as historical materialism. Marxist science, historical materialism is distinct from Marxist doctrine. Much of what was written by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others fall under the category of doctrine. Read more “The Revolutionary Process Today: Science and Doctrine”

U.S. Conjunctural Analysis

March 10, 2017

Introduction

We are in a new phase of imperialism ushered in by the 2008 financial crisis. US power is in decline. The most stalwart voice for Western Imperialism, The British magazine The Economist, noted in its September 17, 2016 Leader, that today’s rise of tech oligopolies and their avoidance of taxes etc. has cast the shadow of “1917 and all that”! How fitting that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Great October Revolution!

The workers and dispossessed of the world suffered a defeat and crisis that was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The international agenda of 1990’s was dominated by US capitalist hegemony under the guise of neoliberal globalization. There were subsequent critical articulations against the US proposal to dominate the South: most notably the World Social Forum and subsequent People’s Movements Assemblies (fully supported, it should be noted, by Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution). Read more “U.S. Conjunctural Analysis”

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