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.
Topic: The left
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).
An anarchist overview of the Kronstadt rebellion, written to mark its 85th anniversay. It exposes the various slanders by Leninists against it.
Categories
Review: Kronstadt 1917-1921
Review of Israel Getzler’s essential book about the Kronstadt soviet and rebellion.
This Open Letter was written for indymedia.ie in answer to an open letter from one of the main leninist parties in Ireland that had been published in their newspaper. I’d recently had some bad experiences of their methodology in other struggles which inspired me to write this reply to explain why such a letter was not going to get a positive response. Later in that year and across the following two we were going to have a lot of problems with this party in the anti-war movment and then the European Union summit protests of 2004.
At the end of the year the organisation called the Irish Anti War Movement went through an internal crisis as some of those involved tried to democratise it. When the Socialist Workers Party who controlled the IAWM responded by arranging the expulsion of some of its opponents from the committee most of the independent groups reacted by disaffiliating from the IAWM.
Anarchists are for the defeat of British imperialism. We would like to see an end to the killings in the 6 counties but we understand that the ultimate cause of the troubles lies at the feet of Britain and the northern sectarian statelet. But we want more, we stand for the creation of a new society in the interests of the working class and against the bosses, both orange and green.
Anarchism stands for ‘Socialism from below’. This means a future society where ordinary working men and women control all aspects of that society.
One measure of the success of the Class War Federation is that so many of the readers of this article will immediately recognise the name as belonging to a British revolutionary group. Well officially Class War is no more and what’s more they produced a final issue of there paper to prove it, No 73 headlined ‘Class War is Dead…long live the Class War’.
‘Unfinished Business’ is 186 pages of Class War explaining its political outlook. What’s more it does seem to represent a real if unacknowledged break with their past. The book is divided into sections which include capitalism, the state and revolutionary organisation. It provides a good, if sometimes flawed, introduction to the topics it covers