An examination of the relationship between Marxists and mass workers' parties and the different situation in Britain and continental Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.
1 October 2010
| Hal Draper/ Victor Serge/Max Shachtman/Lenin/Trotsky/ Brian Pearce/Karl Radek/ Raya Dunaevskaya/Paul Hampton/ Andrew Hornung/ Sean Matgamna
The Bolsheviks led the greatest revolution in history, but today the mempry of Bolshevism as it really was is still half buried under the lies and myths of both the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists. These pieces present the true picture of Bolshevism and of the Russian Revolution.
Here we reprint a polemic by Pat Longman, a longtime member of the AWL who died in 2010, against Sheila Rowbotham’s 1979 article The Women’s Movement and Organising for Socialism, published in the well-known collection Beyond the Fragments.
The working class in successive defeats can lose its historical memory. Layers of the British working class, which fought tremendous strikes in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, will now have to learn again how to organise a strike. Writings like these are historical time-capsules, which can help learn what we would otherwise only learn from raw experience, at great cost, including defeats.
"The party is the highest prize to the young trade unionist who becomes a revolutionist... But to the revolutionist who becomes transformed into a trade unionist, the party is no prize at all".
Does a "permanent revolution" perspective - mobilising the working class to lead a not-yet-achieved bourgeois-democratic revolution, and thus to combine it with a socialist revolution - fit Ireland?
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