Photo: Steve Eason

Welcome to Revolutionary Reflections – a new site for the publication of longer pieces

We are pleased to announce that from October we will be launching a new section of the website called Revolutionary Reflections. The site will be dedicated to longer more in-depth articles, and we are putting a call out for people to send us contributions.

An outlet for revolutionary ideas

Revolutionary Reflections aims primarily to develop revolutionary socialist ideas and contribute to perspectives that can inform left politics today.

Each month we will be publishing a small online collection of pieces, with the idea of them being on a similar theme.

We are looking at pieces that are written in a clear way, that make a contribution by:

• Exploring what is meant by socialism from below;
• Feeding into wider contemporary debates about political strategy;
• Extending Marxism in new directions, and bringing Marxist ideas into contact with other ways of looking at the world;
• Providing analysis of global and international political trends, and historical analysis that has contemporary relevance;
• Examining one’s own and/or competing political and ideological standpoints;
• Exposing the ruling class, their strategies, ideas and policies.

We are aiming to have a mixture of interviews, essays, articles and manifesto style pieces. If people have literary interests and would like to send in poems, drama or fictional prose we would be happy to take a look. Ideas can exist in many forms.

In terms of style, we have produced a style guide. Our aim is to maximise the clarity of pieces and the quality of ideas, and to avoid an academic style that assumes the reader already knows that the writer is discussing.

Promoting new authors, tackling oppression and collective authorship

We would especially like to encourage people who do not think of themselves as ‘writers’ to contribute, and will provide support and guidance to first time writers who are interested in a topic that they would like to write about. We will also gladly take a look at articles people have written and not published.

We would like to tackle the ways that education, class, gender, sexuality and race can prevent people from having the confidence to write. There are lots of ways to do this, which we will be exploring, including buddying experienced writers with first time writers, and putting on workshops on how to write political pieces, and skill sharing events.

Writing for revolutionaries is not just about individuals struggling alone in front of their computer screens. More importantly, writing is a collective and political task which we would promote as widely as possible. Co-authorship and collective authorship can be as powerful an expression of ideas as individual authorship, and we would welcome experiments in group writing.

A space for everyone who wants to explore revolutionary ideas today

We would particularly welcome pieces from people outside rs21 who have shared interests. We also recognise the strength of pieces that might be jointly written by people from rs21 who are active alongside people from other groups.

Topics we would like to publish on

We will gladly receive pieces on any topic that links to our aims, and hope for a range that reflects and deepens what is already on the rs21 website.

There are specific themes that we would most welcome:

• The fundamentals of revolutionary socialism in the 21^st century;
• Class experience in the workplace and community today;
• Reformism today;
• Ecology, class struggle and capitalism;
• Social reproduction and oppression;
• War, imperialism, migration and the state;
• Political economy, neoliberalism and austerity;
• Culture, ideology and questions of consciousness;
• Left movements and politics in different countries.

2017 is going to be a big year for anniversaries with the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the 150^th anniversary of the first edition of Marx’s Capital. So pieces exploring the contemporary relevance of the Russian Revolution and Marx’s work on political economy would be particularly welcome.

Getting in touch

We would encourage anyone to get in touch if they would like to write something, are thinking about writing in the future, have suggestions for topics, or to discuss ways we can offer support for writing, whether individually or collectively.

You can get in touch with us at the following email address: longerarticles@rs21.org.uk [Edit September 2020: please email rs21editorial@gmail.com.]

Thanks and solidarity from the editorial team,

Hazel, Joe, Estelle, Colin, Colin, Jonny and Bill.