NEIL FAULKNER—Lenin was right. The revolutionaries were a minority swimming against the current. Confronting them was the whole power of official society, which, by force and by fraud, was deployed to contain the class struggle. When the workers came onto the streets, they faced force—the batons and bullets of the police. The rest of the time, they were sold a fraud
Yearly Archives
2019
John Wight on Corbyn’s cynically engineered defeat.
8 minutes readPATRICE GREANVILLE—Yes, this deeply intermingled and certifiably sociopathic crowd, this “fortress of cruelty, brutality and mendacity” which, as Wight puts it, has “the temerity to describe [itself[ as a civilised society”, is also quite convinced that nothing radical needs to be done about the cascade of awful things constantly emanating from every pore of its scandalously lopsided arrangements.
How the Pro-War “Left” Fell for the Kurds in Syria
20 minutes readMAX PARRY—Murray Bookchin also wrote at length about the Spanish Civil War but celebrated the decentralized anarchist tactics which incapacitated the Popular Front. The anarcho-syndicalist theorist championed the ‘civil war within the civil war’ as a successful example of his antithetical vision of ‘libertarian socialism’, while his emphasis on the individualist aspects of the former half of his oxymoronic and anti-statist theory often bears a striking resemblance to neoliberal talking points about self-regulating free markets.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Most people with an ear to the ground understand to some extent that the collective behavior of our species is unsustainable. Where they differ in opinion is on what should be done to address this problem. Where they unify in opinion is on the assumption that the solution will look like their own personal ideology winning out over all the others.
PETER LACKOWSKI—In 1952, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) led a revolution that made historic gains with expanded rights for workers, land reform, and national economic sovereignty. It was supported by miners, workers and peasants, but it was led by a white and mestizo middle class who saw the indigenous majority as “primitive,” people who needed to be modernized, assimilated, and brought into the economy as workers and capitalist farmers.
