Who is Raymond Lotta?
Raymond Lotta is a revolutionary intellectual. He takes as his foundation Bob Avakian’s new synthesis and has written extensively on China during and after the Cultural Revolution and played a major role in elucidating the actual thinking of Mao and the so-called Gang of Four that supported Mao. He also played a major role in working to expose the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and China, including through written work and mass public debate. He has, through the Setting the Record Straight project which he leads, fought to spread the truth—and refute the lies—about the experience of the communist revolution in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1956 and China between 1949 and 1976. Most recently, he co-authored “Alain Badiou’s ‘Politics of Emancipation’: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” (demarcations-journal.org).
Lotta has also done major work on political economy, including America in Decline (Banner Press, 1984) and “Shifts and Faultlines in the World Economy and Great Power Rivalry,” a four-part series published in this newspaper in July and August 2008. A recent speech—“Understanding the Global Economic Crisis: System Failure and the Need for Revolution”—can be heard at revolutionbooksnyc.org/Lotta4-23-09.mp3
