Hillel H. Ticktin

Hillel Ticktin is a Marxist theorist. He was born in South Africa in 1937 but had to leave to avoid arrest for political activism. He then lived and studied in the Soviet Union, where his PhD thesis, which was critical of official Communist Parties, was rejected. In 1965 he began teaching at Glasgow University, which later appointed him Professor of Marxist Studies.^[1] In 1973 he co-founded Critique, a Journal of Socialist Theory.^[2]

Summing up his work, Ticktin says: "My work on the political economy of the USSR showed … it to be inherently unviable, and nothing to do with socialism, while not being capitalist. My work on capitalism — or the West — has been to demonstrate the nature of the decline of capitalism, discussing finance capital and the importance of the Cold War."^[3]

Selected Articles

• "Capitalist Crisis".
• "A Marxist Political Economy of Capitalist Instability and the Current Crisis" Critique Vol.37.
• "Political Economy of a Disintegrating Stalinism" Critique Vol.36.
• "Marxist Method, Working Class Struggle and Capitalist Crisis".
• "Decline as a Concept - and its Consequences" Critique Vol.34
• "Political Consciousness and its Conditions at the Present Time" Critique Vol.34
• "The US War on Iraq and the World Economy" Critique No.35/Vol.32
• "The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism" Critique No.26.
• "The Political Economy of Class in the Transitional Epoch" Critique No.20-21.
• "The Political Economy of Declining Capitalism. Pt.1: Britain / Pt.2: Finance Capital" Critique No.16 and 17.
• "The Class Structure of the USSR and the Elite" Critique No.9.
• "Towards a Political Economy of the USSR" Critique No.1.

Books

• Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System, 1992. " Reviewed here".
• The Politics of Race: Discrimination in South Africa, 1991.

References