Three giants of the socialist revolution
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January marks the anniversaries of the deaths of three giants of revolutionary socialism — Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Lenin.
Extra
My Recollections of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
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I made the acquaintance of Engels in 1867 – the year in which the first volume of “Capital” was published.
SWP/IS: history and myth
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Eric Hobsbawm somewhere discusses one of the oddest conundrums in labour historiography, one paralleled now in the historiography of IS/SWP: the 20th century reputation of the Fabian Society as far-sighted pioneers of independent labour representation - the gap between what was and what is afterwards widely accepted as having been.
Eric Hobsbawm on the taming of parliamentary democracy [1951]
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In 1951 Eric Hobsbawm, who died on 1 October 2012 full of fame and honours, wrote an article in which, for once, the imperatives of his Stalinist politics worked to mobilise his great talents as a historian in favour of enlightenment in current politics.
AWL versus SWP
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Material for an AWL day school, November/ December 2005, and other stuff on the political differences between AWL and SWP.
Why the Crisis in the SWP? "The politics of IS" - a 1969 polemic
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The explosion of political discussion in IS, ignited by the sudden change of line by Cliff in favour of building the embryo of a "revolutionary party" seemed six months ago to be the most hopeful thing on the British left. Many, seeing also the new-type IS positions on Vietnam and the Middle East — a radical break with the abstentionist attitude of the group to this kind of struggle in the first 15 years of its existence — wondered whether the leadership might not even disavow other aspects of its past.
Grèce : une situation pré-révolutionnaire
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Suite à d’assez larges discussions avec des socialistes [1] en Grèce et dans d'autres pays, nous avons écrit la résolution suivante comme base pour une discussion internationale plus formelle sur les questions en cours. Il a été traduit en différentes langues, y compris le grec. Si vous voulez écrire des commentaires ou une réponse, envoyez-les nous à awl@workersliberty.org - ou signalez-les ci-dessous.
Elections communales et gauche radicale en Belgique
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Percée du PTB et bilan contrasté
Analyser les résultats d’élections communales est toujours une gageure parce que, dans les choix des électeurs, se mêlent des motivations très diverses, allant des questions purement communales aux grands enjeux nationaux. Chercher à tirer des enseignements généraux à partir des résultats des scrutins à Durbuy et à Puurs n’a pas un grand sens. Par contre, les résultats dans les villes – et surtout les grandes villes – donnent des indications intéressantes.
The 1940 Split in the SWP (USA) and the Founding of the Workers’ Party
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By Max Shachtman
The Workers Party was organised as a result of the factional struggle that broke out in the American Trotskyist movement (the Socialist Workers Party and its youth organisation) when the Second World War began, and ended in a split. Those who founded the new party had reason to be confident.
Lenin Rediscovered
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A reading group in Brisbane is currently studying Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done In Context. These are some notes from its discussions.
The end of the USSR: in the beginning was the critique of capitalism
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[Editorial introduction to the symposium, WL16]
The Russian socialist revolution is dead? It died long ago!
It died not in December 1991, when the USSR formally ceased to exist, nor in August 1991, when the failure of the attempted coup finally broke the back of what power the "Communist Party" had left.
It died more than six decades earlier, when Stalin led the state bureaucracy he personified to the final defeat of the working class and the destruction of the working-class communists led by Trotsky.