A new book on the ill-fated German revolution is exhaustive while casting doubt on the possibility of a successful workers’ uprising. The reviewer prefers an out-of-print work that faults the Social Democratic right for saving the extant ruling class
Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history is accelerated by intensified class conflict.
Considered Ireland's key revolutionary, James Connolly was active in workers' movements in the United States, Scotland and Ireland. This collection reflects his struggles for an Ireland and a world free from militarism, injustice, and deprivation.
November 7, 1917, the American writer John Reed said, was "Ten Days That Shook the World." A hundred years on, the anniversary of the October Revolution is celebrated and debated. But, for more than seventy years the revolution inspired millions around the world, in the belief in socialism, and for an end to colonialism. The failures of the Soviet Union have not however diminished the hopes, aspirations and renewed faith in socialism - a socialism of a different type.
My knowledge of Cuba’s revolutionary offensive in Latin America is based on conversations with Cuban and Latin American protagonists, including – after two decades’ knocking at the door – a five-hour tête-à-tête with Castro in June 2015; as well as on documents from the US, the USSR, the GDR, Canada and Britain.
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Historians of the bourgeois persuasion tend to focus on the doings of major figures in history. Less emphasis is placed by them on the role of working people, often nameless and ill-remembered. Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was a methodological breakthrough in showing how a working class made itself. The book under review follows that precedent, charting how ordinary Europeans from the Middle Ages to post-Soviet Europe made their own history.
For three decades, eight members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this memoir, they tell stories that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded them. The authors are also critical of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its rural-based strategy of protracted people’s war.
According to the back of Meredith Tax's A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, a 'democratic society' with 'women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders' is growing in the midst of Syria's destruction. This new society - Rojava - was founded by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian-Kurdish offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). How does the PKK function internally, how will it deal with class divisions or regional differences?
Socialist democracy, essentially superior, still has a long way to go. Being revolutionary is participating with a perspective of committed criticism. Criticizing is not reporting a known fact; it is acting on it, pushing toward its solution... Radicalism in understanding and in action; the revolutionary seeks the root of a problem, even when it cannot be extirpated immediately, even when one errs in pointing it out and moves rapidly into action....
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