[Los Angeles] CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs’s State Capitalism and World Revolution, 75 Years Later

Sunday, October 5, 2025, 5-6:30 PM, Los Angeles Time

[In first few minutes we’ll hear brief reports/analysis of current issues like the struggle against ICE, new developments in Trumpist fascism, the Palestine genocide, Ukraine war, etc.]

Speakers:

Andrew Hartman, author of Karl Marx in America

Paul So, philosopher and student activist

With a comment by Kevin B Anderson, author of Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads

Art Share

Classroom 1

801 East Fourth Place (Arts District)

Los Ángeles 90013

(Little Tokyo Metro stop)

Remotely on zoom

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89009649969?pwd=EtPKJA4RmxJgBxtfJ24lAkYaj3xOwf.1

Although discussed today more in terms of their analyses of race and class and of autonomous workers movements from below, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) was best known at the time for its state-capitalist analysis. This is seen in a core text by the JFT’s leading theoreticians, CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest), and Grace Lee Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, the pamphlet they issued in 1950 as a theoretical manifesto as they were about to exit the orthodox Trotskyist Fourth International. Never merely a “Russian question,” for the JFT state-capitalism marked a new stage of capitalism born of the transformation into opposite of the Russian revolution and the rise of fascism and the welfare state as two different responses to the crash of 1929. This new stage of capitalism involved state planning, often replacing market forces, and in many cases, the brutal suppression of the working class. Basing themselves on key concepts in Marx, Lenin, and others, the JFT’s manifesto offered probing critiques of leading Trotskyist thinkers Germain (Ernest Mandel) and Michel Pablo, who in different ways held that Stalin’s USSR was somehow still a workers’ state. This meeting will explore critically not only the theoretical framework of this 1950 work on state-capitalism. It will also examine how this framework helps us to understand contemporary capitalism in an era of rising fascism, while also allowing us to avoid campism on the left in response to problems like the Ukraine war.

Events

[Los Angeles] CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs’s State Capitalism and World Revolution, 75 Years Later