Marxists

Kino Eye: A Popular Front film, 1936

The recent French elections have revealed a left that is in chaos. In 1936, much of that left united in the “Popular Front”. It was riddled with contradictions, and short-lived. Trotsky was scathing in his analysis. Yet one aspect of the Popular Front was a flourishing of films with a left orientation. Many film directors, gathered in the Groupe Octobre, sided with the Popular Front. The best known was Jean Renoir, who directed The Crime of Monsieur Lange in 1936. Amédée Lange (Rene Lefevre) is a writer who works for a publishing company owned by the loathsome Batala (Jules Berry) who is...

Karl Radek on China

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 was one of the high points of working-class militancy in the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s a wave of strikes swept the country, with workers’ organisations becoming major powers in the main cities, with ever-greater numbers of workers coming out, joining unions and taking control of the streets.

Charlotte Despard, a rebel from age 46 to 95

Part one of a series on the feminist and socialist Charlotte Despard (1844-1939). Part two is here . At her 89th birthday party, in 1933, Charlotte Despard made a speech urging her friends to fight fascism, and she quoted Lenin as she put the case for revolution. Days earlier she was making a speech in Trafalgar Square, bent with old age and shaking her arthritic fist as she made the case for anti-fascist mobilisation just as she had made countless other speeches in the previous four decades in support of socialist, feminist, anti-imperialist and republican causes. Charlotte was also a...

Debate on Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything

Debate on The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity , by David Graeber and David Wengrow A new history of humanity , by Clive Bradley Stuck in the night of everything? , by Martin Thomas Primacy to culture above material circumstance , by Paul Muddle

Primacy to culture above material circumstance

In his review of “The Dawn of Everything; A new history of humanity” (2nd November 2021) Clive Bradley wonders whether David Graeber and David Wengrow’s challenge to orthodoxy , including Marxism, “is as profound as they think, or if in fact it’s possible to integrate their findings into a historical materialist account”. Judging by the reaction from some other Marxist reviewers the answer is a resounding “no” on both counts (two critiques in The Monthly Review found that, among other things, Graeber and Wengrow were “voluntarist”). Clive sees the emphasis on human agency as one of the great...

Stuck in the night of everything?

A left-wing anthropologist has written that the title of David Graeber's and David Wengrow's new book, The Dawn of Everything, should instead be The Tea-Time of Everything, because it covers only "relatively recent prehistory". It also scarcely mentions "history", in the sense of accounts based on written records, so the subtitle A New History of Humanity is also off-key. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, write mostly about hunter-gatherer societies of which there are substantial records; early agricultural societies; and the societies of "something in the order of 3...

Crimean War wasn’t “collective security”

Eric Lee’s latest column ( 2 March ) contains the occasionally repeated claim that Marx supported the Anglo-French forces in the Crimean War (1853-6). Reading Marx’s articles in the New York Tribune from the time, which were written in the style of a war reporter and most likely by Engels, it is difficult to discern any clear support for the war. Certainly the articles unequivocally denounced Tsarism and Russian expansionism. It is clear that Marx/Engels saw the Anglo-French axis as more “progressive” than Tsarist Russia. They were scathing of British and French conservatives who showed pro...

Karl Marx: sixth campist

Eric Lee’s column in Solidarity 626 gives a potted social-democratic history of NATO, and all but makes the claim that Karl Marx would have supported NATO against Russia, as he supposedly supported “British and French troops in the Crimean War” against the Tsar. Solidarity and Eric Lee both trace our political inheritance back to the erstwhile American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, who fought for independent working class politics in the face of a Trotskyist movement which lent its support to the imperialist Russian state, but in old age moved towards the right and supported American imperialism...

Putin's bots and whataboutery

A fortnight into the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s mafia state the erroneously termed “social media” are awash with whataboutery. What about Palestine? What about Iraq? What about Afghanistan etc.? Such stances are the political equivalent of not being able to chew gum and cross the road at the same time. It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort for people who regard themselves as socialists to denounce the actions of one imperialist power and also condemn similar actions by another. The “what about” brigade are effectively excusing dreadful crimes against humanity which the Putin...

For scrupulous reviews

I’ m grateful to Stuart Jordan for alerting comrades to the RS21 pamphlet on ecology ( Solidarity 619 ). We certainly should evaluate what the rest of the revolutionary left says on these important matters. I’ve not read the RS21 pamphlet, so I trust Stuart’s criticisms are warranted. However I think he is far too casual about Marx and Engels, the founders of our tradition and where our assessments often begin. There is nothing “so-called” about Marxist metabolism. For two decades this term has been used as shorthand for Marx’s approach to ecological questions in his mature political economy...

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