Tag Archives: Russian Revolution

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 ...

We publish below a draft document on the situation in Europe which will be discussed, amended and voted on at a meeting of the CWI International Executive Committee. After the meeting, we will publish the amended version agreed at the meeting. The dramatic events that have erupted in Catalonia and the Spanish state are a reflection of the underlying social ...

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 ...

Here we re-publish an article written by Per Åke Westerlund, from Rattvisepartiet Socialisterna (Committee for a Workers’ International in Sweden), first published in Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party of England & Wales in 2004.   VLADIMIR LENIN, the main leader of the Russian revolution, made the following insightful observation in mid-1917: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing ...