Portside

On the centennial of the Russian Revolution, John Reed's first-hand look at the uprising of workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors is fit reading about a mass movement that overthrew the old aristocracy and then the bourgeois class itself. An exposition on ordinary people making history for themselves, the book is a gripping account of events in Petrograd, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks lead the various workers councils in finally seizing state power.

This new book, says Peter E. Gordon, argues that "ever since the fall of communism, a culture of defeat has characterized the left’s understanding of political history and theoretical critique." Gordon guides us through the intricacies of the case author Enzo Traverso makes in this volume.

A review of the martyred German/ Polish Marxist's revolutionary's writings, with special emphasis on her seminal work, Reform and Revolution (1900, revised 1908). The classic essay is available in numerous collections of her work, and is accessible on line at Marxists.org

China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

British artist, novelist, prodigious essayist and poet John Berger, best known for her magisterial and approachable Ways of Seeing and who died in January, is remembered here for his radical approach to Art, when it functions to make sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, when it becomes a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, what Berger called guts and honor.

This new collection of essays offers an interesting glimpse into the work of this consistently interesting Marxist thinker and cultural critic.