Marxism and war

1914-18: what we should remember

The First World War, which started 100 years ago in 1914, was very popular at the start. Tory minister Michael Gove is trying to revive that mood. By the end of the sordid carve-ups which followed the war’s end, many had come round to the view advocated by only a small revolutionary socialist minority at the start: that governments had sent millions to be killed or maimed in pursuit of imperialist rivalries. This article from the US Trotskyist weekly Socialist Appeal on the 20th anniversary of the end of the war (11 November 1938) explains why. The patriots are celebrating the twentieth...

The Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution

D. A. Santillan has written a tragic, very significant book* to tell the “real role” of the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), the “only influential mass organization that remained incorruptible in the face of new loves” and to place the blame for the victory of Franco where he thinks it really falls – at the door of the “democracies,” Russia and the Popular Front government of Spain. Santillan, leader and chief of the Anarchist Federation of Iberia, was the organizer and active leader of the militias that crushed the fascists in Barcelona in July, 1936, and then marched on to Aragon. He...

The Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution

M. Wilson D. A. Santillan has written a tragic, very significant book* to tell the “real role” of the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), the “only influential mass organization that remained incorruptible in the face of new loves” and to place the blame for the victory of Franco where he thinks it really falls – at the door of the “democracies,” Russia and the Popular Front government of Spain. Santillan, leader and chief of the Anarchist Federation of Iberia, was the organizer and active leader of the militias that crushed the fascists in Barcelona in July, 1936, and then marched on to...

The collapse of the Socialist International in the First World War

“To forget is counter-revolutionary.”* “If our resolution does not foresee any specific method of action for the vast diversity of eventualities,” said Jean Jaurès in urging the adoption of the famous anti-war resolution of the Second International at its special conference in Basel on November 24, 1912, “neither does it exclude any. It serves notice upon the governments, and it draws their attention clearly to the fact that [by war] they would easily create a revolutionary situation, yes, the most revolutionary situation imaginable.” So the resolution did. The unanimous vote cast for the...

August 4th 1914: The First World War

Go fight, you fools! Tear up the earth with strife And1 spill each others guts upon the field; Serve unto death the men you served in in life So that their wide dominions may not yield. Stand by the flag—the lie that still al- lures ; Lay down your lives for land you do not own, And give unto a war that is not yours Your gory tithe of mangled flesh and bone. But whether it be yours to fall or kill You must not question why nor where. You see the tiny crosses on that hill? It took all those to make one million- aire. The bugle screams, the cannons cease to roar. "Enough! enough! God give us...

Friedrich Adler Assassinated the Austrian Premier as a Protest Against World War 1: His Speech in Court, On Trial For His Life

On 21 October 1916, the "Minister-President" of Austria, Karl von Stürgkh, was shot and killed by Friedrich Adler, the secretary of Austra's large and not-very-radical Social-Democratic Party. Adler shot Stürgkh as a protest against World War One. Below is the text of Friedrich Adler's speech in court at his subsequent trial, as translated and published in the US magazine "The Class Struggle" of July-August 1917. As an introduction we have an article by Leon Trotsky (from April 1922) on Friedrich Adler and his father Victor Adler, also a leading figure in the Austrian social-democratic...

We need our own remembrance

On 28 October, the Daily Telegraph accused the University of London Union (ULU) of having “banned” representatives of the union from attending the University’s official Remembrance Service. Quite how the union’s democratic body taking a decision not to officially attend constitutes a “ban” is beyond comprehension. However, what is in danger of being lost here is the debate about the politics of Remembrance, over and above any manufactured “scandal” or constitutional wrangle within ULU’s Senate. The chief charge laid against those who refuse to engage with official Remembrance ceremonies is...

Atomic Energy: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

A comprehensive Trotskyist response to the new age which opened with the American atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It was published in Labor Action, New York, at the end of 1945. "The impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast." - From a Tokyo broadcast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the...

ATOMIC ENERGY: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Atomic Age

"The impact of the bomb was so terrific that prac- tically all living things, human and animal, were liter- ally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pres- sure engendered by the blast." —From a Tokyo broad- cast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the "democratic" camp and dropped on what we were told was an "ape-like, bestial and inhuman" people are still reverberating throughout the entire capitalist world and shaking the very foundations...

Cloudy Sunday

Cloudy Sunday is the first novella by Mike Kyriazopoulos. Mike will be well-known to many members and sympathisers of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, in which he was active until 2007 when he moved to New Zealand and joined the Workers' Party/Fightback, as well as to reps in the Communication Workers' and Public and Commercial Services Unions in which he was also active as a postal worker and civil servant. He began writing Cloudy Sunday earlier this year after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. For a short book of seventy pages, Cloudy Sunday packs a lot of historical and other...

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