Reviewing a volume that amply clarifies the legacy of martyred Pan African historian and militant Walter Rodney, the Guyanese intellectual who emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution.
The Comintern was formed at a moment of revolutionary hope quite different from conditions today. Yet beginning in 1920, the Comintern tried to chart a course for revolutionary socialists in non-revolutionary times.
Veteran Russian communist Dr. Slava Tetekin noted that Putin has been in power now for 18 years -- longer than Brezhnev had been. During that time he has presided over rising inequality and the destruction of Russia's industrial economy. This makes it all the more important to redevelop working-class mobilisation and to ensure that the current reawakening of enthusiasm for the October Revolution is converted into a wider political movement for socialism.
Reader Comments: Sexual Predator Against Prosecutor of KKK in Alabama; North Carolina church vandalized this week by KKK; Picketing Kennedy White House against nuclear weapons; Worker Abuse and Sexual Abuse; Looking back - 100th Anniversary of Russian Revolution; Readers catch errors in Portside posts; How Should Progressive Talk About Muslim Ban - new resource; Announcements - New York City politics; Anti-Semitism today; Asian dance benefit for Puerto Rico; and more..
Reader Comments: It's a New Beginning - Election Day Victories; AFL-CIO Delegates Support #BlackLivesMatter; Lessons for Democrats; Painters Union Support Nicaraguan Workers and their Families; Readers Debate: Why Soviet Union Collapsed; Workers' Tips; Lots of Announcements: Los Angeles, Pasadena, Culver City, New York, and Cuba; and more....
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.
One day after the Revolution, the Soviet government issued a Decree of Peace -- a signal of the centrality of the struggle against war to the building of socialism.
What do we celebrate, then, when we look back at 1917? What have we learned?
A Review of China Mieville's book, The Story of the Russian Revolution, Verso Books, 2017, 384 pages, $26.95 hardcover.
China Mieville, the award-winning science fiction/speculative fiction writer, accurately describes his history of the Russian Revolution “for everyone.” This is a well-paced, detailed but readily readable account of the Russian Revolution,
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the author takes aim at the narrative that socialism crumbled in the Soviet Union under its own weight, brought about by inherent weaknesses and contradictions of socialism. Instead the case is made that a concerted and relentless 10-year secret war by the Reagan Administration so weakened the Soviet economy and Soviet psyche, along with missteps by the Soviet leadership, that socialism was overthrown.
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