A menudo se ha acusado a Marx y Engels de defender un doble rasero y de tener una doble moral. Se supone que ambos se oponían a aplicar a la lucha de clases los mismos principios éticos que suelen regular las relaciones entre individuos. De ahí la acusación de que ellos y sus discípulos (Lenin y Trotsky, entre otros) propugnaban el principio de que en la lucha de clases “el fin justifica los medios”.

Nuestro Instituto fue fundado por Ernest Mandel en 1982 y ha desarrollado una intensa actividad desde entonces. Durante más de tres décadas, el Instituto Internacional de Investigación y de Formación (IIRF, iire.org) ha organizado cursos educativos, seminarios y debates, dirigidos a activistas sociales y políticos de todo el mundo. Para mantener el IIRE como un espacio único para la educación socialista, estamos lanzando una campaña financiera.

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.

Marx and Engels have often been accused of advocating double standards, and having a double morality.¹ Supposedly, they opposed applying the same ethical principles that usually regulate relations between individuals to the class struggle. Hence the accusation that they and their disciples (Lenin and Trotsky, among others) put forward the principle that in the class struggle ‘the end justifies the means’.

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.