The summer issue of Jacobin has an environmental focus. As the editors say, climate change “has to be at the centre of how we mobilise and organise.” It includes two substantial pieces on extractive industries, one on Donald Trump’s secretary… Continue Reading
A review of China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017), £18.99. There is a long-held narrative among liberal and not-so-liberal commentators that contrasts a justified libertarian revolution in Russia in February 1917 with an authoritarian Bolshevik… Continue Reading
A review of Dave Sherry, Russia 1917: Workers’ Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed (Bookmarks, 2017), £12.99. At a time when it looks as if capitalism can’t—and shouldn’t—survive through the 21st century, it’s timely to remind a new generation… Continue Reading
The previous issue of International Socialism included a positive review of Tariq Ali’s book The Dilemmas of Lenin.1 The review is right that in general the book offers an accurate telling of the Russian Revolution. But in one aspect Ali… Continue Reading
As France entered the 20th century, it embodied, for many people, and to many socialists, the ideals of liberty, egality and fraternity that had been the pillars underpinning the revolution of 1789. Surrounded on all sides by kingdoms and empires,… Continue Reading
A review of Joseph Choonara, A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017), £9.99, Fred Moseley, Money and Totality: A Macro-monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the end of the Transformation Problem (Haymarket, 2016), £24.99 and Ingo Schmidt… Continue Reading
A review of Aaron Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask (Merrion Press, 2017), £14.99 UVF: Behind the Mask is a vast if somewhat episodic account of the killings, feuds and internal factionalism of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force written by… Continue Reading
The following lyrics were written by an anonymous black soldier in the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment, one of the first black combat regiments, at the height of the Civil War in the United States (1861-5). They undermine the pernicious myth… Continue Reading
The June 2017 general election saw a voter revolt, once again, shake the political establishment in Britain. And once again, like the close-run 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the vote to leave the European Union in 2016, almost all the… Continue Reading
The two Russian Revolutions of 1917 inspired socialists and trade unionists across the world. The February Revolution raised the prospect of the overthrow of dictatorship, October the possibility of workers’ revolution and socialism.1 October ripped up the blueprint for socialism… Continue Reading