The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Something different this week. If you perused the Guardian website on 14 January, you may have noticed an item on Soviet film posters up to about the mid-twenties. It is well worth checking out. These are among some of the finest examples of graphic art in the twentieth century. Inspired by Constructivism, incorporating elements of dynamism, montage and a striking use of colour, these posters are a stirring accompaniment to the films of the period, the famous like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (not on the website) and others such as Miss Mend , directed by Boris Barnet (1926). The...

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

Although the Labour leadership's new bans on four organisations have been justified mainly in terms of the issue of antisemitism, the question of Marxist and Trotskyist politics has also been raised. We republish this article written by one of our comrades for socialist Labour Party magazine The Clarion in February 2017, which discusses the issues in the form of a reply to Labour right-winger Luke Akehurst. At the time dozens of Workers' Liberty people had recently been expelled from the Labour Party. Do revolutionary socialists have a place in Labour? By Sacha Ismail Some activists on the...

Workers' Liberty recently published a pamphlet about Indian socialist and anti-imperialist, and 1920s UK MP, Shapurji Saklatvala. (You can buy it here .) The pamphlet explains: His youngest daughter and biographer Sehri speculated that the seeds of revolutionary politics were planted in Saklatvala's mind when he volunteered to help Ukrainian Jewish bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine combat the plague which killed hundreds of Bombay's people every week for years at the turn of the century. Haffkine was a former populist-socialist and political refugee from Czarism. As Saklatvala would later...

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 66 January 2001. Paul Hampton analyses the arguments used by Tony Cliff and others to rubbish the ideas developed in the 1940s by Max Shachtman and the “unorthodox” Trotskyists in the USA about the USSR. This is the second part of an article whose first part appeared in Workers’ Liberty 62. By the late forties Shachtman came to the conclusion that Stalinism was “the new barbarism”. Cliff understood that there were two meanings of the term “barbarism’; the first sense meant a description of the period since 1917, given the belatedness of the socialist...

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 62 March 2000 In theories of Stalinism, as Haberkern comments in his review of The Fate of the Russian Revolution (WL59-60), plainly there are many nuances, and valuable contributions from the likes of Burnham, Carter and Draper which ought to be more widely known. But the book, criticised by Ernie for its failure to include more such texts, was not intended as a compilation of theories of bureaucratic collectivism. It is rather a critique of the ideas of latter-day Trotskyism, from the premises of Trotsky and by his most ardent followers. Many...

Left Oppositionists in Siberian exile, late 1920s Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No.59/60 December 1999 / January 2000 The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One is a significant contribution to the literature of the anti-Stalinist left. Long buried in the archives the polemics and analyses of those socialists who refused to accept the definition of Stalin’s barbaric regime as a “workers’ state” simply because property was nationalised and private property, large and small, was obliterated, deserve to see the light. My criticism of this anthology...

Statue of Stalin toppled in the 1956 Hungarian revolution Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No. 53 February 1999 I welcome the publication of The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One a sort of library in itself. It is a handy compendium of the sweep of Max Shachtman's journalism, and of his co-thinkers. Always penetrating, often witty, and never without interest, Shachtman was a very gifted revolutionary journalist. But he was no theoretician. This puts him well ahead of James P Cannon, who was neither, but journalism is what it is, and not theory. The...