Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory

• 1. Introduction

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  Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory began its life in May 1973, founded by a scholar named Hillel H. Ticktin who had a specific and urgent question to answer. How do you explain what the Soviet Union actually was, from the inside out, without simply accepting what Moscow said about itself? That question drove the journal from its first issue. The original title told listeners exactly where it stood: Critique: Journal of Marxist Theory and Soviet Studies. It was not a neutral academic exercise. It was an intervention. Ticktin accepted the analysis of Leon Trotsky as a corrective to what he saw as the Stalinist distortion of Marxism. The journal had a built-in prediction it was testing, a prognosis Trotsky had made in 1936. And what happened to the Soviet Union would eventually answer whether that prediction had been right.

• 2. Anti-Stalinist Roots

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  Trotsky's 1936 prognosis was stark. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's program of Socialism in One Country would ultimately fail, and the capitalist market system would be restored. Critique made that forecast its operating hypothesis. The journal's founding aim was to analyze the empirical reality of Stalinism while rejecting the empiricist method. That sounds like a contradiction, but Ticktin was after something specific. He wanted to discover what he called the objective laws of motion of Stalinism. Looking hard at the facts was necessary; letting the facts alone determine the theory was not enough. The journal positioned itself as anti-Stalinist Soviet studies. It rejected both the official Soviet line and the tendency of Western Cold War analysts to explain the USSR purely in terms of power and geopolitics. Marxist categories were the tools, applied critically rather than devotionally.

• 3. After the Soviet Collapse

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  When the Soviet Union dissolved, Critique faced a choice. A journal built around the study of one political formation now had to find its footing in a world where that formation no longer existed. The editors chose expansion rather than closure. Critique became a more general journal of socialist theory, turning its attention to political economy, philosophy, history, and art. It began examining both capitalist and non-capitalist societies and took up the question of the instability of world capitalism after the Cold War. The scope had widened considerably from the original Soviet studies brief, and the journal's readership moved with it. Routledge took over as publisher in April 2006, giving the journal a major academic distribution platform. It continues to appear four times per year.

• 4. A Roster of Contributors

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  István Mészáros, Ernest Mandel, and Roman Rosdolsky were among the names that appeared in Critique's pages. That list places the journal in a particular current of twentieth-century Marxist thought. Bertell Ollman, James Petras, Jürgen Rojahn, and Chris Arthur also contributed. The founding editor Hillel Ticktin is himself listed among the notable contributors, suggesting his engagement with the journal extended beyond its editorial direction into its intellectual content. The journal is formally published under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Socialist Theory and Movements at the University of Glasgow, which has housed it since the founding. Its current acting editor is Yassamine Mather, who has continued the project into the present.