The Russian Revolution and Its Fate
Socialism and Democracy
Submitted on 8 April, 2007 - 16:19
Socialism and Democracy: Workers' Liberty special issue (no.17), January 1994
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Download as pdf:
- debate from 1982 between Michael Foot, then Labour Party leader, and John O'Mahony, with a 1994 introduction
- appendices, including texts on socialism and democracy by James P Cannon, Max Shachtman, V I Lenin, and Hal Draper.
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Read online:
Introduction: Democracy, direct action, and the class struggle
Michael Foot: My kind of democracy (part 1)
Michael Foot: My kind of democracy (part 2)
John O'Mahony: Introduction
Chapter 1: Is Direct Action Against Thatcher Undemocratic?
Chapter 2: The Appeal to History
Chapter 3: The Scarecrow of Stalinism
Chapter 4: Superstition or Struggle?
Appendix 1. Labour Party: the sham of "one member, one vote" - John Bloxam and John O'Mahony
Appendix 2. PR, democracy, and socialism - John O'Mahony
Appendix 3. Marxism and democracy - James P Cannon
Appendix 4. The movement of the majority - James P Cannon
Appendix 5. 1917 was a democratic revolution - Max Shachtman
Appendix 6. Lenin on Democracy and Dictatorship
Appendix 7. Democracy in the Russian Revolution - Leon Trotsky (1918)
Appendix 8. An Eyewitness Account of the Russian Revolution- Hal Draper
Appendix 7 and appendix 8, included here, were not in the printed version of January 1994.
Workers' Liberty 3/11: 1917 - revolution for freedom and equality
Submitted on 7 April, 2007 - 21:57
The Russian Revolution, the Stalinist counter-revolution, and the working class (Analyses from Labor Action and The New International, 1942 to 1957)
Download pdfs (without pictures): pages 1 to 8; pages 9 to 16.
Cliff's State Capitalism in Perspective 3
Submitted on 8 June, 2008 - 15:26- Login or register to post comments
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Stalinism and the defeat of the workers - North London AWL branch meeting
Submitted on 22 February, 2008 - 12:48
Red Rose, 127 Seven Sisters Road, near Finsbury Park tube (Picc/Victoria)
North London's AWL branch meetings are open to all. At the moment we are doing a series on the life and work of Leon Trotsky. This week the focus is on the defeat of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism.
Trotsky argues that Stalinism was not the logical product of Bolshevism, but represented a bureaucratic counter-revolution against the Russian working class - separated from Bolshevism by "a river of blood"
Suggested reading: The Revolution Betrayed (1936) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm. Short reading: chapter 11: Whither the Soviet Union?
For more info contact David Broder - 07828 844695/davidthetrot@googlemail.com
Trotsky's New Course - North London AWL branch meeting
Submitted on 22 February, 2008 - 12:43
Red Rose, 127 Seven Sisters Road, near Finsbury Park tube (Picc/Victoria)
North London's AWL branch meetings are open to all. At the moment we are doing a series on the life and work of Leon Trotsky. This week the focus is on The Soviet Union after the Revolution and 'The New Course.'
“The struggle against the bureaucratism of the state apparatus is an exceptionally important but prolonged task, one that runs more or less parallel to our other fundamental tasks: economic reconstruction and the elevation of the cultural level of the masses. The most important historical instrument for the accomplishment of all these tasks is the party. Naturally, not even the party can tear itself away from the social and cultural conditions of the country. But as the voluntary organization of the vanguard, of the best, the most active and the most conscious elements of the working class, it is able to preserve itself much better than can the state apparatus from the tendencies of bureaucratism. For that, it must see the danger clearly and combat it without let up.”
Reading: The New Course (1923) -
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/index.htm.
Short Reading: Chapter 1: the question of party generations.
For more info contact David Broder - 07828 844695/davidthetrot@googlemail.com
1917 (verse)
Submitted on 16 December, 2007 - 13:59
Who fears to praise Red Seventeen?
Who quails at Lenin’s name?
When liars mock at Trotsky's fate
Who adds his, “Theirs the blame”?
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The Ukrainian Revolution 1917-1921: Deciding the fate of European socialist revolution
Submitted on 21 November, 2007 - 15:51
On the ninetieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution it is important to recognise that it was more than a Russian event. It swept across the entire Russian Empire with the long oppressed nations making their bid for freedom. The most important challenge was in “Russia’s Ireland” – Ukraine. To mark the anniversary of the proclamation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic ninety years ago on November 22, 1917 this article examines the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21, which was pivotal in deciding the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the entire European socialist Revolution.
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1917 + 90 — Leon Trotsky: All power to the soviets!
Submitted on 19 November, 2007 - 10:02
This is the 90th anniversary of the Russian workers’ revolution of November 1917. Since the fall in 1991 of the Stalinist regime which eventually overwhelmed the workers’ government and made a counter-revolution in the 1920s, more has been available to researchers in the west. Some new books have advanced our understanding of the revolution. None, however, can match the exciting exposition of the course of 1917, in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
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Alexandra Kollontai: Socialist Feminist
Submitted on 12 October, 2007 - 09:18
The Russian revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, is best known for her organisational work among Russian working class women prior to, and immediately after, the 1917 revolution and her writings on sexual morality and the family. She has become better known largely as the result of feminist interest in her life and career.
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1917: how the workers made a revolution
Submitted on 30 August, 2007 - 15:47
Download whole pamphlet as pdf (12MB). The pamphlet was published in November 1987, on the 70th anniversary of the 1917 revolution.
Reading for dayschool on Russian revolution, 1 September 2007
Submitted on 30 August, 2007 - 13:45
1. For a timeline of the revolution, click here.
2. For a short summary article from We stand for workers' liberty, click here.
3. For a PDF of the AWL pamphlet 1917: how the workers made a revolution (published in 1987 on the 70th anniversary of the revolution), click here. (Warning: this is quite a large file, 12MB.) 32 pages long, this is an excellent overview, also including articles on less well-known issues connected to the revolution such as the national question, women's liberation and black liberation.
Revolution and counter-revolution in Russia: a timeline
Submitted on 29 August, 2007 - 17:03
1917
February (March by the western calendar): workers' demonstrations in Russia overthrow the Tsar (king). Prince Lvov leads Provisional Government; Petrograd workers set up a "Soviet" (workers' councils).
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AWL day school on the Russian Revolution
Submitted on 29 August, 2007 - 13:09
A dayschool for new activists
12-5.30pm, Saturday 1 September, The (Kings Cross rail or tube)
This year is the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution. But why take the Russian revolution as a model? Isn't it irrelevant nowadays, or worse, proof that revolution can't work? Didn't the Bolsheviks lead to Stalin's dictatorship?
Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross
Trotsky and 21st century socialism
Submitted on 24 August, 2007 - 23:38
“I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.”
Leon Trotsky, April 1940
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1917 + 90: Why Should You Care About the Russian Revolution? A dayschool, 1 September
Submitted on 24 August, 2007 - 16:44Trotsky and the Red Army in the civil war
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:17
By Larissa Reissner
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1917 was a democratic revolution!
Submitted on 4 August, 2007 - 18:07
By Max Shachtman
The 1917 revolution was one of the greatest democratic moments in history.
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"Weekly Worker" and USSR Imperialism — Kabul 1978 and Petrograd 1917: was the Russian Revolution a 'coup'?
Submitted on 29 June, 2007 - 15:44
In defence of the October Revolution: Kabul 1978 and Petrograd 1917. Was the Russian Revolution a 'coup'? By Sean Matgamna (August 2004). Download pdf or read articles in html below.
The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, volume 1
Submitted on 14 June, 2007 - 20:18
By Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, C L R James, Leon Trotsky and others, with an introduction by Sean Matgamna. 608 pages. £16.99 post free. Buy online
- or send a cheque for £16.99, payable to AWL, to AWL, PO Box 823, London SE15 4NA.
The anti-Stalinist revolutions in Eastern Europe, 1989-90
Submitted on 10 May, 2007 - 16:39
A collection of articles on solidarity with workers in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, and on those revolutions and the prospects they opened up
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Russia's 1917 Revolution: Kerensky, head of the government that Lenin ousted, debates Max Shachtman
Submitted on 9 May, 2007 - 09:42
SELDOM does history record the former head of a government, deposed by social revolution, facing up in an open debate 34 years later to a modern representative of the same ideological current which swept him from power. This was the situation in the February 8 [1951] debate at the University of Chicago where Max Shachtman confronted Alexander Kerensky, the head of the régime which was overthrown by the great Russian Revolution.
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The fate of the Russian Revolution: introduction to Trotsky's "Three Conceptions"
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 23:02
By Sean Matgamna.
Glossary for Trotsky's "Three Conceptions"
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 22:46
19O5: strikes broke out in December 1904 and January 1905. On 9 January workers marching to the Tsar's palace lo appeal for his help were shot down. The strike wave grew.
Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 22:35
An article by Trotsky from 1940
The Life of Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 21 April, 2007 - 18:48
By John O'Mahony
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How not to quote Lenin
Submitted on 9 April, 2007 - 09:43
AS noted in the accompanying summary of the debate, Kerensky spent much of his time working over scraps of quotations from Lenin — from different periods, contexts, and articles indiscriminately, — la Boris Shub — under the heading of a discussion of the Russian Revolution and democracy.
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October was a true working class revolution
Submitted on 9 April, 2007 - 09:31
By Max Shachtman
THE Independent Socialist League does not subscribe to any doctrine called Leninism. It does not have an official position on the subject and I am pretty certain that nobody could get the League to commit itself officially on a term which has been so varyingly and conflictingly defined as to make discussion of it more often semantic than ideological or political.
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Trotsky on democracy in the Russian Revolution (1918)
Submitted on 7 April, 2007 - 17:02
THE FATE OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY.
When, after Korniloff’s adventure, the paramount parties on the Soviets made an attempt to make amends for their previous attitude of indulgence towards the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, they demanded the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
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