The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

The two Trotskyisms during World War 2: Workers' Liberty 3/48

Tracing the development of "two Trotskyisms" through from the 1940 split to the 1944 polemic between Harry Braverman and Max Shachtman. Click here to download as pdf or read online . The pagination in the pdf is correct, but, by a mishap, the pages of the printed version of Workers' Liberty 3/48, as a pull-out in Solidarity 347, are in the wrong order. Our apologies to readers. Check the printed version with the pdf, or follow this guide: Page 2 has been mistakenly swapped with page 6, and page 7 with page 11. The printed pull-out can be navigated as follows: 1: the first page, with the...

The fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — Workers' Liberty 3/25

Download as pdf , or read online below. Timeline Introduction 1. The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions 2. What’s in the coffin at the funeral of socialism? 3. Lies against socialism answered 4. Stalin’s system collapses 5. Why socialists should support the banning of the CPSU 6. The triumph of unreason: market madness in the ex-USSR 7. What was the Bolsheviks’ conception of the 1917 revolution? 8. Why the workers want to restore capitalism 9. In the beginning was the critique of capitalism 10. An open letter to Ernest Mandel 11. Trotsky and the collapse of Stalinism 12. And...

The road to Bolshevism: the triumph and defeat of Narodnaya Volya

Sixth in a series of articles around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 “ The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers’ group” — G V Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Letter to the International Socialist Congress, 1891 “ And our proletariat? Did it pass through the school of the medieval apprentice brotherhood? Has it the ancient tradition of the guilds? Nothing of the kind. It was thrown into the factory...

When the workers awakened in Moscow and Petersburg

Fourth in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 All populism, in theory, “denied a future to Russian capitalism. The proletariat was assigned no independent role at all in the revolution. It happened accidentally, however, that propaganda designed in its content for the villages found a sympathetic response only in the cities... assembling only the intelligentsia and some individual industrial workers”. (Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin ) The Workers’ Union of South Russia of 1875 (described in Solidarity 699 ) survived the arrest of its leaders for a...

The road to Bolshevism

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...

Stalin in London: not the true story

Stephen May’s Sell Us The Rope is a new novel about the London congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg play leading roles in the story. I know: it sounds great. But before you click on ‘Buy Now’ on Amazon, let me tell you a bit more. The book’s premise — that Stalin was a long-term, paid informer for the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) — made the story especially interesting for me. The fact that it had a positive review in the New York Times — that was icing on the cake. Sadly, this is a very disappointing book. The...

Letter: Why you should read Eric Blanc

When the Labour Party left was at its height in the early 1980s, the SWP's critique was that this left was doomed by its wish to win elections, which would make it adapt to un-radical opinion. We replied that revolution required winning elections, in workers' councils even if not in parliament. Today the SWP's model of revolution remains one of lots of strikes and demonstrations, plus a "disciplined" party which will eventually be strong enough to defeat the bourgeois state. The issue of how the working class can become organised and aware enough to become a ruling class – through workers'...

Revolution: the “Finnish road” vs "the Russian"

There is much to be gained from reading Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) . But within the valuable information and explanation of what some lesser-studied parties were doing is an argument in favour of what Blanc refers to as “orthodox Marxism” which doesn’t hold. Blanc’s central thesis is simple: up to 1914, there was a classical Marxism of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky, its most able theorist. At the end of the war, the Russian Revolution provided a “Bolshevik” model, then promoted by the...

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