Contents
- Foreword
- Nicaragua: Who’s ruling who?
- Palestine, Peace and the PLO
- Swedish model loses market appeal
- South Africa: architects of a sell-out
- Marxism and the National Question
- Ways of thinking: Trotsky on dialectics
- Poland stumbles on the road to capitalism
- Religion and the tasks of the revolutionary party
- Review: the USFI’s programmatic manifesto
Foreword
Reactionary civil wars rage in the ex-USSR and Yugoslavia. Ethnic tensions mount in Africa. Struggles against national oppression or for national privilege exist alongside each other. Marxism is accused of being helpless in the face of national movements and ideologies.
Marxism is indicted of either having no explanation of nationalism or a vulgar economic explanation. In the main article in this issue we refute these charges through a critical review of the classical Marxist debate on the national question.
In another article on South Africa we look at how one possible solution to national claims — federalism — is currently being pursued by Inkatha and the Afrikaners in order to prevent black majority rule from touching the power and wealth of white rulers.
Two other articles deal respectively with rational and irrational approaches to knowledge of the world. In one piece we offer our readers Trotsky’s insights into the method of solving political problems; in another we examine the reasons that give rise to the alienated and fantastic explanations of the world as embodied in religion and how to deal practically with the question of religious belief among workers.