This article article originally appeared in the January 1964 issue of Nuestra Industria, the journal of the Cuban Ministry of Industry, headed by Che Guevara. Ernest Mandel and Charles Bettelheim had been requested by the Cuban government to give their ideas on socialist construction in what became known as "the Great Debate''. This translation was originally published in: Bertram Silverman (ed.) Man and Socialism in Cuba. The Great Debate (1971).

Economic Categories and Historical Reality

Naturally one cannot reduce the political struggles that characterized the three successive phases of the bourgeois, national-democratic revolutions in the Southern Netherlands (those of the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries) to purely or essentially religious and constitutional conflicts.ⁱ One must lay bare the socio-economic motivations and components of these struggles. This may sound banal. For some contemporary historians, however, it is far from self-evident.

In this lecture from the series on imperialism today, Matveev discusses the particular character of Russian imperialism and the evolution of the Putin regime. Ilya Matveev is a political scientist formerly based in St Petersburg, Russia, and cooperator with the media-project posle.media

In this lecture from the IIRE series on the changing shapes of imperialism, Hanna Perkhoda and Catherine Samary discuss the background to the Russian war against Ukraine and the tasks of the international left.

In this lecture from the IIRE's serie on the changing shapes of imperialism, Pierre Rousset discusses the rise of China and its international impact. Pierre Rousset is a former co-director of the IIRE as well and especially involved in solidarity with different Asian countries, author of works on East Asian politics and ecology and editor of the website Europe Solidaire.

In this lecture from the IIRE's serie on the changing shapes of imperialism, Peter Drucker discusses the evolution of US imperialism.

Peter Drucker is a former co-director of the IIRE. He is an advisory editor of the US socialist journal Against the Current and author of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Haymarket books).

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