Socialism
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Unite for a left alternative in Europe (PDF)
According to the promises of the forces that dominate Europe, the European project was to be one of peace and social progress; it is now being transformed into a nightmare where the only horizon offered to the peoples of Europe is one of brutal and generalised social regression. Europe as a whole has been thrust… Continue reading
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A moment for revolutionary ambition? By Tom Walker
2013 was, to put it mildly, a bad year for the far left in Britain. It began with the crisis in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) bursting out publicly, and ended with the second mass resignation from that party after a year-long battle over the basic principles of women’s liberation. Continue reading
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Book Review: Wild Socialism: All Power to the Councils! By Gary Roth
Workers’ councils have been something of an embarrassment for the left ever since they first appeared in the early 1900s. With the exception of a few key moments, they have never attracted much interest either. Two new books by Martin Comack and Gabriel Kuhn focus on the German workers’ councils that developed at the end… Continue reading
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Climate Change and Socialism: An interview with John Bellamy Foster By Steve da Silva
Steve da Silva (SD): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition. From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting… Continue reading
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Video: From Marxism to neoliberalism: Ronnie Kasrils on how Mandela & ANC shifted
Speaking from Johannesburg, leading anti-apartheid activist and former South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils discusses the evolution of the African National Congress’ economic views from its time as a liberation movement to leading South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Kasrils says the ANC was forced to make a “Faustian pact” with neoliberalism in order… Continue reading
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Quantum physics, dialectics and society: from Marx and Engels to Khrennikov and Haven By Ben Gliniecki
Quantum physics occupies a fascinating place at the cutting edge of modern scientific research. First developed in the early 20thCentury, quantum theory is allowing today’s scientists to plumb new depths when it comes to matter and motion. A new book, Quantum Social Science, by Andrei Khrennikov and Emmanuel Haven argues that applying the logic of… Continue reading
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The Fourth International and Socialist Resistance
Socialist Resistance (SR) is currently in the process of seeking to build a new socialist organisation with the Anti Capitalist Initiative (ACI) and the International Socialist Network (ISN). This process may expand to include other groups. One of the things that has become clear is that activists from different backgrounds have sometimes only a partial… Continue reading
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Is the “Nightmare of Marxist revolution” stalking Britain? By Rob Sewell
People are becoming increasingly revolutionary, according to the latest polls. A growing hatred for big business and profiteering comes on top of the bankers’ bonus scandals, the Libor rigging scandal, the foreign exchange manipulation scandal, and the callous profiteering of the energy companies. Energy companies are now trusted less than bankers and car salesmen. This… Continue reading
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15th International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties – PCP Press Release and Common Action
The 15th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties was held in Lisbon, on November 8-10, under the motto “The deepening of the crisis of capitalism, the role of the working class and the communists’ tasks in the struggle for the workers and peoples’ rights. Imperialism’s offensive, the realignment of forces at the international level,… Continue reading
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Today’s world would be unthinkable without Russian Revolution By Oleg Artyukov
The Day of the October Revolution, November 7, is still a public holiday in Belarus. In Russia, it stopped being one after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More precisely, before 7 November 2004, the day was marked in calendars as a Day of Accord and Reconciliation. But the surrogate did not live long. Continue reading
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Video: The Russian Revolution: triumph or tragedy – Alan Woods and Orlando Figes
8 November 2013 — Socialist Appeal We here publish the video footage of the debate between Alan Woods – editor of www.marxist.com and author of “Bolshevism: the Road to Revolution” – and Orlando Figes – Professor of History at Birkbeck University and author of “A People’s Tragedy” – on the true nature of the Russian Revolution, and Continue reading
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'Left reformism' and socialist strategy By Ed Rooksby
There has been a significant revival of interest among the radical left in “big picture” questions of socialist strategy that, as Mark L. Thomas has pointed out, represents a return to “important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades”. Continue reading
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Book Review: The talented and reviled Mr Pepper (Comintern agent) By Dan La Botz
The great European revolutionary epoch of the post war period from the 1910s through the 1920s provides endless biographical material revealing all that is best and worst in the human material of revolution, the Russians having been the most studied, providing shelves of biographies of Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin and Trotsky…If perhaps Victor Serge represents the… Continue reading
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Alienation in Karl Marx’s early writing By Daniel Lopez
As Karl Korsh noted in Marxism and Philosophy, the philosophical foundation of Marx’s works has often been neglected. The Second International had, in Korsch’s view, pushed aside philosophy as an ideology, preferring “science”. This, he charged, tended to reduce Marxism to a positivistic sociology, and in so doing, it internalised and replicated the theoretical logic… Continue reading
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Giap: Death of a Giant By Jack A. Smith
Giap’s extraordinary generalship drove French imperialism out of the three countries of Indochina — Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — in the mid-1950s. At the time he declared the anti-French struggle “was victorious because we had a wide and firm National United Front… organized and led by the party of the working class — the Indochinese… Continue reading
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Contested Reproduction and the Contradictions of Socialism By Michael A. Lebowitz
Why did ‘real socialism’ and, in particular the Soviet Union, fall? Let me note a few explanations that have been offered. With respect to the Soviet Union, one very interesting explanation that has been suggested is that it’s all the fault of Mikhail Gorbachev. And not simply the errors of Gorbachev but the treachery. Those… Continue reading
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Video: Probably Possible By Andrew Gavin Marshall
27 August 2013 — Andrew Gavin Marshall The indefatigable Andrew Gavin Marshall in a stream of revolutionary consciousness Continue reading
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The Bullet: Connective Party or Return to a "War of Maneuver"?
For some two decades, the anti-globalization movement and its successors have assumed that society contains within itself – and automatically throws up – political oppositions and organizational forms independent of capital and of the state. There is simply the need to encourage the cumulative growth of society’s own potentialities for forming alternatives apart from the… Continue reading
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Preoccupying: an interview with David Harvey
David Harvey highlights the importance of challenging the state and addresses the everchanging ideal of the city and the social groups that sustain and contest it. Continue reading
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Creating a Situation that Does Not Yet Exist
For some two decades, the anti-globalization movement and its successors have assumed that society contains within itself – and automatically throws up – political oppositions and organizational forms independent of capital and of the state. There is simply the need to encourage the cumulative growth of society’s own potentialities for forming alternatives apart from the… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 