PaulHampton's blog

At last, seventy years after its first publication in French and half a century after the first abridged English translation, we have the Victor Serge’s fantastic Memoirs of a Revolutionary in full.

Michael Heinrich’s book, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, (Monthly Review Press 2012) is a lucid and refreshing theoretical interpretation of Marxist political economy.

John Riddell’s Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Haymarket 2012) is a tremendous work of scholarship in the tradition of David Riazanov.

The Fourth Congress adopted a call for an anti-imperialist united front in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, aimed at “the mobilisation of all revolutionary forces” in “an extended, lengthy st

The early Communist International’s focus was on working class self-liberation and this was reflected in the time spent on discussions on party building, work to transform the labour movement and on t

Probably the most wide-ranging and rancorous discussion at the Fourth Congress concerned the transitional slogan of a workers’ government.

The Fourth Congress of the Communist International synthesised and systematised for the first time seminal but largely latent ideas found within the Marxist tradition that had preceded it.

John Riddell’s Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Haymarket 2012) is a tremendous work of scholarship in the tradition of David Riazanov.

The AWL’s book, Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary, has started some very fruitful discussions about what it means to be a Marxist in the present period.

Today is the 95th anniversary of the Balfour declaration, the promise made by the British government to support a Jewish state in Palestine.

The black-gloved salute from the podium at the 1968 Olympics is one of the most riveting images in the history of protest, surpassing its sporting moment.

There is no definitive Marxist assessment of the current economic crisis or of the period leading up to it, but there is a vibrant debate among Marxists trying to grapple with the underlying causes of

Latin America appears to have long been in the thrall of ‘barbaric’ Marxism: the stale Stalinism of the official Communist Parties, the populist Stalinism of the Castro current, the national reformism

A common charge heard against Marxism in recent decades is that it is a Eurocentric theory, one with arguably colonial assumptions and underpinned by Western values.

Mark Lynas has written a provocative book that deserves to be read and discussed by socialists, trade unionists and ecologists.

Unprepared to acknowledge his catastrophic mis-assessment of the situation in Libya, unreconstructed Stalinist Seamus Milne prefers to serve up more wholesale historical revisionism.

Review of Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (Haymarket 2010)

Review of Richard Day and Daniel Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, (Haymarket 2011)

“The dreamer himself sees in his dream a great and sacred truth; and he works, works conscientiously and with full strength, for his dream to stop being just a dream.

Hardt and Negri’s musings on the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (Guardian, 25 February 2011) are a studied exercise in rapacity. Having mapped the road to nowhere for the anti-capitalist movement a decade ago, these confusionists now seem intent on misdirecting the great revolutionaries who’ve topped dictators.

The Ecological Rift, the latest book by John Bellamy Foster and his co-thinkers Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half lamentation,

It is a measure of the state of climate politics when apparently radical thinkers accommodate themselves to the mainstream.

Paul Hampton reviews Derek Wall, The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement (2010)

Review of Antonio Gramsci by Antonio Santucci, Monthly Review Press (2010)

“In mass politics, to say the truth is precisely a political necessity.” (2010 p.158)

The bonapartist regime of Hugo Chávez suffered a setback in the Venezuelan elections on 26 September, winning a majority of parliamentary seats but not the two-thirds majority it desired.

Review of Noel Castree and others, The point is to change it: geographies of hope and survival in an age of crisis (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell).

Fidel Castro is right. Hard to spit out, but absolutely right. Speaking to an American journalist and a policy analyst (as reported in the Guardian):

For many years our paper Socialist Organiser, a forerunner of Solidarity published between 1978 and 1995, carried a science column written by Les Hearn.

During the 1970s, a large number of workplace unions and rank and file organisations in Britain produced workers’ plans, to tackle unemployment, restructuring and other employers’ attacks.

In the early 1970s one of the most inspiring labour movement-based environmental campaigns was led by building workers in Australia.