Editor's Choice

The Fountain Head deserves a review in spite of the fact that it is as blooming a stinkeroo as ever came out of a Hollywood studio. But since this dim view of its merits as a film has no necessary connection with the reason it invites discussion, we skip the bill of particulars. If you blunder into it looking for an evening's entertainment, let the consequences be on your own head.

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Who was Lenin? He led the workers of the Tsarist Russian Empire to make the most profound revolution in history in 1917. He was the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, without which the workers would have been defeated.

In a 1975 referendum on UK’s membership of the European Economic Community (Common Market), forerunner of the European Union, most of the left argued for UK withdrawal. That was the culmination of a step-by-step opportunist collapse into left-nationalism since the 1960s, when all the would-be Trotskyist groups said the answer to limited European capitalist integration was European workers’ unity, not national withdrawal. This article, taken from Permanent Revolution No. 3*, describes the evolution.

Che Guevara is lionised as a revolutionary icon by wide sections of the global left. Even those claiming some Trotskyist heritage, from the various “Fourth Internationals” to the British SWP, publish mostly uncritical appreciations of the individual and his politics. Yet Guevara was never a working class socialist nor even a revolutionary democrat. He helped overthrow the hated dictator Batista in Cuba, but only to replace it with a Stalinist regime.

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Why should Marxists want to narrow our appeal to 'the workers', enrolling people from other classes only to the extent that they rally behind the working class? Why not seek a broader unity of 'ordinary people'?

Originally published in Workers' Liberty magazine, January 2001. By Chris Reynolds

The pivot of Marx's critique of political economy is the concept of abstract labour, or universal social labour - labour as the expenditure under standard conditions of a quotient of average labour-power. Abstract labour, according to Marx, is the substance of value.

• Why the Working Class is Central
• Trotsky Taught Us Class Action
• What is Leninism?
• What is Trotskyism?
• Leon Trotsky: A Life For Socialism — October 1879 - August 21 1940
• October 1917: Revolution for Freedom In Equality
• An Eye-Witness Account of the October Revolution (HD)