Uneven and Combined Development: Modernity, Modernism, Revolution (3): Cartographies And Chronologies
In the third of his five pieces on Uneven but Combined Development, Neil Davidson looks at the application of the theory to England, Scotland, Germany and Japan before looking the Soviet transition to state capitalism.
Letters from an anti-fascist fighter in Spain
Following the Battle of Cable Street, Scottish communist Jim ‘Jock’ McKissock travelled to Spain to fight against fascism 80 years ago. He wrote letters to his comrades in back in London. They were passed by one of those long-standing communists in the 1970s to Colin Revolting’s father and he found them among his father’s piles of […]
Cable Street and its aftermath
This week sees the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street in London. Gary McNally argues against a recent trend among historians to dismiss the antifascist demonstration as counterproductive.
Review – Sex and the Weimar Republic
Colin Wilson reviews Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis by Laurie Marhoefer. This book offers a glimpse of a different kind of LGBT politics. Today we’ve made advances, but in the context of neoliberalism. In the Weimar Republic – Germany from 1918 to 1933 – there also existed a […]
Eleanor Marx – Unrestrained by convention, unafraid to live her contradictions
The recent biography of Eleanor Marx shows she didn’t just interpret the world but acted to change it, says Charlie Burton. ‘Tussy is me’, Karl Marx once said of his youngest daughter, Eleanor. For not only did Tussy (the nickname given to her in infancy) inherit her father’s looks, she also inherited his thrust for […]
A flawed revolutionary icon – a review of The Politics of Che Guevara
Mike Gonzalez reviews Samuel Farber’s recent book, The politics of Che Guevara, published by Haymarket Books. For two generations of activists, Ernesto Che Guevara has symbolized a kind of selfless heroism. His relative youth at his death in 1967 (he was 38) conserved his air of rebelliousness and the image of a man interested only in the […]
The story of a Bolshevik worker-intellectual: a review of Barbara Allen’s ‘Alexander Shlyapnikov’
Ian Birchall reviews Barbara C Allen’s Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik, published by Haymarket Books.
The Somme: Remember…and explain
Ian Birchall reviews Neil Faulkner’s new pamphlet, Have You Forgotten Yet? The Truth about the Somme I happened to be on Waterloo Station on 1st July. When I saw dozens of young soldiers assembling, I wondered for a moment if our rulers had launched a military coup to reverse the referendum. Later I learned that it was […]
Obituary: Bartley Willcock
Ian Allinson and Sam O’Brien describe the remarkable life of Brian Bartley Willcock who died last week at the age of 82. Note: this has been updated with some details about funeral arrangements at the bottom. From an early age Bartley got very involved in his local church, St Clement’s Higher Openshaw, across the road […]
Ireland’s greatest revolutionary
For the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 we republish Shaun Harkin‘s account of the life of Irish Marxist and revolutionary James Connolly. James Connolly was executed by a British firing squad on May 12, 1916, in Dublin City along with other leaders of what became known as the Irish Easter Rising. At his […]
The First Workers’ Government
145 years ago today a disastrous war among European capitalists produced the first workers’ government in Paris. James B introduces Marx’s analysis on the Commune. Today marks the 145th anniversary of the foundation of the Paris Commune. In 1870 Emperor Napoleon III led France into a disastrous war with Prussia. Paris, defended by the citizens’ militia of […]
James Connolly: ‘Socialism and Irish Nationalism’
Connolly’s 1897 article from an issue of L’Irlande Libre addresses socialism versus the chauvinist conception of Irish nationalism. Marking the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, we are republishing this from the Marxist Internet Archive. It was transcribed by the James Connolly Society in 1997. The public life of Ireland has been generally so much identified with the struggle for political […]
From Slaveholders to Sanders: A Brief History of the US Democratic Party, for British Readers
American socialist Bill Crane provides a brief history of the Democratic Party from its inception to the present, and asks how revolutionaries might relate to the movement behind presidential nominee Bernie Sanders. The US Democratic Party is the oldest surviving modern political party.[1] In its longer than two centuries’ history, it has survived multiple political crises, […]
Pilfering, pranks and working-class pride – a review of the BBC’s ‘Cradle to Grave’
The BBC sitcom Cradle to Grave is a sympathetic and engaging portrait of working-class London, set at a key time for class struggle. Colin Revolting reviews.
“You can’t organise a riot”: racism, riots and arrests in 1981
In memory of John “Brad” Bradbury of the Specials who topped the charts with Ghost Town whilst Britain burst into flames of riots and racism in 1981 – Colin Revolting remembers how anti – racists danced to the Specials and fought against racism and unemployment. January A fire at a house party in New […]
A homosexual Christmas in 1905 Berlin
Colin Wilson rediscovers a forgotten chapter of LGBT history in this account of a “uranian” Christmas, written by a leading campaigner over a hundred years ago. Magnus Hirschfeld was a doctor and a leader of the German LGBT movement from the 1890s to the 1930s.The text translated here is an excerpt from one of his earliest books, […]
HM 2015: How the West Came to Rule
Marxist scholars have long debated the origins of capitalism. Bill Crane reports on a fruitful debate at this year’s Historical Materialism conference about the recent book ‘How the West Came to Rule’. The question of how capitalism emerged and became the basis of the international system has generated a number of incredibly fruitful debates among […]
Review: The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
Just over 40 years after it was originally preformed, the Dundee Rep ensemble has revived the play The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil (running until 26 September). The original was written and performed by the 7-84 theatre company (named after the statistic 7% owned 84% of the wealth). Last year’s independence referendum in […]
“You can’t organise a riot”: racism, riots and arrests in 1981
In memory of John “Brad” Bradbury of the Specials who topped the charts with Ghost Town whilst Britain burst into flames of riots and racism in 1981 – Colin Revolting remembers how anti – racists danced to the Specials and fought against racism and unemployment. January A fire at a house party in New Cross […]
The battle of Grosvenor Square
Continuing our series of refections from different types of activism over the years, Mitch Mitchell discusses the battle of Grosvenor Square in 1968, which took place during protests against the Vietnam war.
1915 Glasgow Rent Strike: how workers fought and won over housing
One hundred years ago the workers and housewives of Glasgow forced the government to place on the statute book the first-ever Rent Restrictions Act.
Bollocks to the Poll Tax
Colin Revolting remembers the day 25 years ago when one of the biggest marches ever turned into a mass riot which sunk the Tory flagship Poll Tax policy and took Prime Minister Thatcher down with it.
On decolonizing education and the perils of speaking good english
Racism is both material and ideological, reaching even into the heart of language, thought and memory. Annie Teriba asks how education and minds can be decolonized. This piece was originally published on blackgirlspeak.wordpress.com When asked about the legacy of colonialism, I point out that we must still speak a colonial language in order to be […]
Malcolm X in the Midlands
On the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, Zakir Gul examines a visit he made to a small town near Birmingham, and his enduring legacy.
The Ghetto uprising – resistance is never futile!
Jan Ladzinski introduces Wladyslaw Szlengel’s poem, Counterattack, on the 72nd anniversary of the start of revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto Exactly 72 years ago the Warsaw Ghetto saw an unexpected revolt. In the years of the Nazi occupation as many as 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles, deprived of food and […]
The roots of American racism 4: state racism and the new black resistance
In the last of four articles, Bill Crane looks at “colourblind” racism and mass incarceration since the Civil Rights movement – and how they have contributed to the police racism and violence that has sparked the current protest movement. So far this series has described how racism has existed as part of the United States from its […]
Germany 1918-23: A forgotten history of revolution
Joe Sabatini reviews a collection of articles about how the German Communist Party organised in the early 1920s – only a few years after revolution had swept through Germany – and translates two of the pieces. Best of KPD: Linke Organisierung Damals Und Heute – in English Left Organisation Then and Now – is a […]
The roots of American racism 3: Civil war to civil rights
In the third of four articles, Bill Crane examines the origins of racism in the United States. Here he looks at how the racist segregation of Jim Crow was implemented in the 1890s and then abolished by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In the second article in this series on the origins of American racism, we […]
The roots of American racism 2: The Civil War and after sees racism undermined, then reimposed
In the second part of a four-part series, Bill Crane examines the origins of racism in the United States. Here he looks at how in the Civil War of the 1860s and the Reconstruction which followed it racism was fundamentally weakened and then restored. In the US, racism operates in a way that is fundamentally […]
The roots of American racism
Why is America so racist? In the first of four articles, American socialist Bill Crane explains how today’s struggles around Ferguson and police racism have their roots in a history of slavery and dispossession. It’s often difficult for me, as an American socialist, to explain many things about my homeland to comrades and friends in […]