An Anarchist analysis of the revolt against neo-liberalism in Argentina, with suggestions on how it could be turned into a genuine social revolution rather than a mere revolt.
Categories
Topic: History
Part of a debate on the Russian revolution from 1994. The revolution was one of the most important events of the 20th century until the 1990’s the most important debate on the left was whether or not it had failed. Now with the collapse of the USSR a far more important debate is uncovered, why did it fail.
We have been insisting on the need for the far left to re-appraise the tradition of the Russian revolution and in particular the role the Bolsheviks played in destroying that revolution. One of the most detailed responses to the anarchists critique of Bolshevism was published in the winter issue of International Socialism the journal of the Socialist Workers Party (the largest Leninist group in England).
Categories
Review: The Bolsheviks in Power
Review of a new book on the first year of Bolshevik power. Documents the Bolshevik assault on soviet democracy and the opposition.
Categories
How the Revolution was Lost?
A critique of the standard Leninist account of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, using the SWP’s How the Revolution was Lost (by Chris Harman) as its basis.
Categories
1905
Overview of the 1905 Russian revolution, plus an analysis of why Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the mass strike is wrong about anarchism.
Categories
Workers Against Lenin
A short review of a book which discusses labour protest under Lenin. Essential reading.
Categories
Robert Emmet and the rising of 1803
The traditional history of the 1803 rising is of little more than a ‘blood sacrifice’ intended to confirm Ireland’s right to independence. Ruan O’Donnell’s book concentrates on exploding the myth that the rising was doomed from the start. It was planned not as a noble gesture of a handful of nationalists but rather as a mass uprising intended to decapitate the British state in Ireland at the very moment of a French invasion and liberation of the country.
The Easter 1916 rising in Dublin is often portrayed simply as nationalist blood sacrifice but it can also be examined as an insurrection which was seriously planned to defeat the British army. It is credited with transforming political attitudes in Ireland, leading to the partally successful war of independance but nationalist histories tend to understate the other reasons why the situation was transformed and to completely ignore the wave of workers struggles that broke out during the war.
Revolutionary martyrs, being unable to speak for themselves, are liable to be claimed by all sorts of organisations with whom in real life they would have had little in common. When they are of national or international importance, like the Irish syndicalist James Connolly, this also mean that biographies often tend to be very partisan affairs, aimed at recruiting the dead to one cause or another. The story of their life becomes reduced to a morality tale whose conclusion is whatever positions the author holds dear today.