PaulHampton's blog

US socialists debate Guevara

The US socialist magazine Against the Current has carried some debate about Cuba and Che Guevara in its recent issues.

In November-December it published a critical review of Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy’s book, “Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy” by Kit Wainer.
The January-February...

'The Bolsheviks Come to Power'

Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power is one of the best accounts available in English of the 1917 revolution in Russia. First published in 1976 and republished in 2004, it covers the period from the July days, when it looked like the revolution would be rolled back, to the victory of...

Twenty-one hours a week - the right to work less

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) has published a report calling for a large reduction on the working week – to around 21 hours. The report, 21 hours is worth a read, as it marshals evidence against the long hours culture of advanced capitalism and because it puts a number of good human and...

Only workers can build the planetary Ark

In the preposterous film 2012, solar flares cause the earth’s tectonic plates to move, resulting in ecological catastrophe. The ruling classes respond by building a number of modern Arks, so that the best of humanity will survive the apocalypse and begin again. Reflecting existing divisions, the...

What to do with 'What is to be done?'

Review of Lars T. Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be done? in context (2008 Haymarket).

Lenin’s What is to be done? (WITBD) ranks as one of his most famous books and it is a text that revolutionary socialists have long used to educate ourselves. However our understanding of the book will never...

The SWP and ecology

A review of Martin Empson, Marxism and ecology (2009).

The SWP has been agitating on climate change for several years – particularly through the Campaign against Climate Change (CaCC). As such its members present themselves as the “best builders” of the “united front”. On a certain level this has...

Some lessons from Copenhagen

The Copenhagen climate talks were an utter failure. But what lessons do Marxists argue climate campaigners should draw from this experience?

1) Sober up on global geopolitics. Globalisation and neoliberalism live on – but at the behest of national states and their capitalist governments...

Tanks on Trotsky

Anyone who believes that the Stalinists who run the Morning Star have repented might want to read their review of Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky (2 December).

According to Roger Fletcher’s review, Trotsky death in Mexico was “bizarre”, rather than a well-documented state...

Review of Robert's Service's biography of Trotsky

By Paul Hampton

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Critic as Artist (1891) that while “formerly we used to canonise our heroes, the modern method is to vulgarise them”. He went on to lament that, “cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable”...

Mexican Electrical Workers Union Fights For Its Life

Dan La Botz has warned that the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), one of the most important in Latin America, is fighting for its life.

On the night of October 10, the Mexican President ordered federal police to seize the power plants, while he simultaneously liquidated the state-owned Light...

The mistakes of Mandel and Cliff on the Russian question

The “class nature of the Soviet Union” was for most of the twentieth century a debate that defined the meaning of socialism. Stalinism soiled the socialist project and stood as a discredited monument to attempts to overthrow capitalism. Whether it was fending off the taunts of “Get back to Russia”...

The significance and meaning of climate change

Mike Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, is probably the best overview of the subject published in recent years.

Hulme heads the Tyndall Centre, an essential reference point for cutting-edge climate research, bridging university...

Leon Trotsky and the annihilation of classical Marxism

In the early hours of 24 May 1940, twenty men in uniform led by a world-famous artist burst into the last refuge of Leon Trotsky. The muralist David Siqueiros and his Stalinist cohort riddled Trotsky’s Mexican sanctuary with over 300 shots.

Seventy three bullet holes were counted in the doors...

Victory at Zanon - workers' control entrenched

Workers at Zanon, the occupied ceramics factory in Argentina, won a significant victory last week. The regional council administration agreed that the factory is now the legal property of the cooperative that runs it. The factory was taken over by workers in 2001 and run under workers’ control ever...

Marxism, metabolism and ecology

Over the past decade or so, John Bellamy Foster has been one of the principal architects of the revival of Marxist ecology, arguing that the relationship between nature and human society is best conceptualised in terms of metabolism. Foster’s new book, The Ecological Revolution (2009) brings...

Guevara as economist: workers short-changed

A late night meeting of the Cuban leadership towards the end of 1959. Fidel Castro looks around the room and asks for ‘a good economist’ to become the president of the National Bank of Cuba. Half asleep, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara raises his hand. Castro replied with surprise: ‘Che, I didn’t know you...

Coup in Honduras

This is a useful analysis of the coup in Honduras, from the Solidarity (US) website - publishers of Against the Current.

http://www.solidarity-us.org/hondurascoup

The First Latin American Coup on Obama's Watch
- by Dan La Botz, June 28

The Honduran military overthrew and exiled President...

Why we can’t sign the Belem declaration

The antinomies of eco-socialism

The Belem eco-socialist declaration was published last month. It will be formally launched at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil later this month. It was commissioned by the Paris Ecosocialist Conference of 2007, and written by Ian Angus, Joel Kovel, Michael...

Third period tankie CPGB upset

Unwilling to debate the AWL in public, the so-called CPGB continues its snipping at us from the safe distance of its paper. In the latest WW (748) Lawrence Parker, apparently a “writer on the revolutionary oppositions within the post-war Communist Party” takes up our political characterisation of...

Revolutionary socialists killed in Venezuela

Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena, members of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI, United Socialist Left) and of the UNT trade union federation in Venezuela have been killed.

According to reports on the Aporrea website, the three men were killed in the early hours of this...

"CPGB": Time to tell the truth

The pathetic intervention of the CPGB at the AWL-Machover on Sunday has been followed by an even more pathetic write up in its paper, the Weekly Worker (16 October). Interestingly, it does not print what its own comrades said – as we have in Solidarity – since to do so would expose the apolitical...

Jack London, socialist

It is an irony of history that Jack London should be remembered today mainly for dog stories - the children’s fictional stories Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905) remain his best-known works.

It is often forgotten that London was a socialist. A recently published collection of his...

CPGB – third period Stalinists

The prize for the most hysterical response to Sean’s article on Israel, Iran and nuclear weapons goes inevitably to the CPGB (Weekly Worker, 31 July). No doubt keen to drum up some interest in the callow summer event they call “the Communist University”, the gossip-sheet devotes its cover and three...

Osanloo: Incarcerated – but not forgotten

A year ago Mansour Osanloo, President of the Vahed Syndicate – the Tehran Bus Workers’ Union was arrested. He was severely beaten, insulted and abused by the Iranian security service and has suffered poor health, due the violence, harassment and frequent imprisonment he has endured over many years....

Behind the Black Power salute in 1968

If you missed the “Black Power Salute” film on BBC 4 last night you missed one of the best hours television for ages.

The film looked behind the iconic salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium after the 200 metres at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Smith and Carlos were suspended from the U...

Venezuelan socialists get organised

Two reasons to cheer in Venezuela recently, as socialists restarted the task of building an independent workers’ party, separate from Chavez’s ruling bourgeois PSUV.

In April supporters of Orlando Chirino within the C-CURA trade union left organised a conference to establish a new workers’ party...

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