Russian Revolution Centenary

Editorial of the Socialist, issue 1170 The horror of war, of families fleeing for their lives as bombs fall on their cities and towns, is dominating the news. Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is being watched with fear and revulsion. His farcical propaganda claims this is a ‘special military operation’, designed to fight ‘Ukrainian fascism’. Yet Ukraine is being trampled ...

By Niall Mulholland The war in Ukraine has revisited the ‘national question’ in Europe, ie the language, culture, and democratic rights of populations to territory, in a bloody manner, not seen since the Balkans wars in the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Niall Mulholland of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) explains how capitalism cannot peacefully solve the ...

On 21 August 1940, Leon Trotsky, the Marxist thinker and fighter, and co-leader of the Russian Revolution (along with Lenin), was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents. The article ‘Trotsky’s Assassination’ originally appeared in the quarterly theoretical magazine of The Militant (now the Socialist Party), in 1980. By Lyn Walsh On 20 August, 1940, Trotsky was struck a fatal blow ...

Should anyone accept Theresa May’s and the Labour right’s version of events? By Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary Jeremy Corbyn is broadly right and his pro-capitalist critics both within the Tory government and their Labour fifth column in the Parliamentary Labour Party are wrong and lying in their responses to the recent use of nerve agents in Britain. Of ...

Welsh update of Chekhov an engrossing tale of 1980s class conflict By Scott Jones The Cherry Orchard is set in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 1982. Yes, that’s right. It’s a modern retelling of the original written by Anton Chekhov just before the first Russian revolution in 1905. And it’s brilliant. Action revolves around an old manor house on the west Wales ...

A Response to Bhaskar Sunkara This article was originally published in the left wing American magazine, Counter Punch on the 28th July 2017. The author, Alan Jones, is a member of the Executive Committee of Socialist Alternative, the American sister party of the Socialist Party. At the end of June, in the midst of a growing discussion about socialism in ...

“This has been the biggest school the CWI has ever organised”, said Peter Taaffe from the International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), when opening (together with Juan Ignacio Ramos, general secretary of Izquierda Revolucionaria in the Spanish state) the special unification congress which finished a historic week for the CWI and Izquierda Revolucionaria. It was not ...

Massive demonstrations involving nearly a million people erupted in Petrograd on 2-3 July 1917, in a colossal outburst of anger and discontent. Workers, soldiers and peasants were reacting in fury at the failure of the provisional government – installed after the February 1917 revolution – to transform their terrible conditions. They were suffering high food prices, poverty wages, factory lockouts ...

Michael Johnson, from the Socialist Party’s LGBT group, examines the lessons of the Russian revolution for the struggle for LGBT+ rights today. The Russian Revolution is not typically held up as a significant event in the advancement of the struggle for LGBT+ rights. In fact, it’s often seen as the opposite, given the terrible oppression that LGBT+ people faced under ...