Hal Draper

Unfair to Draper

A lot of political tendencies and ways of thinking come under fire in the editorial “what is left anti-Semitism?” in Solidarity 3/82. Among them are those on the left who maintain appalling double standards towards Israel – opposing its occupation of Palestine with far more venom than that with which they oppose the equally (if not more) brutal occupations of, for example, Chechnya by Russia. These attacks are justified, and I agree that the double-standards applied to Israel and the history of Jewish nationalism can legitimately be analysed as amounting to de facto hostility to Jewish people...

Comments on Martin Thomas's notes on Hal Draper

Interesting Ideas Submitted by Arthur Bough on 13 October, 2005 - 12:24. I think Martin has raised some interesting and important ideas in this review. It would have been useful to have linked this discussion to the contributions in other threads concerning building the revolutionary Party, What is Leninism, Schachtman's defence of Leninism, etc. which take up the same theme. I would argue, as I have previously, that it is quite possible to adopt many, if not all, the Leninist concepts of organisation, and the need for ideological clarity etc. on which this is based (obviously not just that...

Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism by Hal Draper (part 2)

After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation The revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern... A check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits the confident statement: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the programme, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin. The first four congresses of the Comintern (from 1919 to 1922) adopted a large number of long, detailed, analytical theses on all the major questions of...

Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism by Hal Draper

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!”’ Karl Radek(1) Introduction to the myth Since the First World War, Marxists, would-be Marxists, and even many non-Marxist socialists have gained a good part of their political education through a close study of Lenin’s anti-war writings of 1914-1918. In fact, even much of anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist literature is often based on an...

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