All this and more

From Criticism etc:

Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom has been translated into Arabic and published in a small edition. The project was undertaken by the Victor Serge Foundation, based in Montpellier, France, and organized by the American expatriate and Serge translator Richard Greeman (New York Review Books has just published his translation of Serge’s novel Conquered City). A brief account of a book release event held in the Moroccan coastal town of Benslimane (“On Socialism and Freedom in Morocco“) appears in the new issue of News & Letters. A fuller account of Greeman’s visit to the country (“Violent Crackdown in Morocco Fails to Halt Movement“) can be found on his Z Space blog. A PDF version of the translation of Marxism and Freedom can be found on the web site of the U.S. Marxist-Humanists.

and

The new issue of Against the Current features a long essay by historian Alan Wald on the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (“A Winter’s Tale Told in Memoirs“), of which he was a member in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is safe to characterize the piece as largely an exercise in SWP nostalgia and nowhere near as interesting as his book The New York Intellectuals (1987), in which he discusses in penetrating depth the actual period of the disintegration of the SWP and Trotskyism as a whole (1939-1941). Wald, a sympathizer of the Cannonite tradition, instead places the decline in 1970s when the (in his account) semi-natural phenomenon of “radicalization” began to wane and the current leadership consolidated its position. Even though  this piece is disappointing, Criticism &c. looks forward to the third installment of Wald’s trilogy on American leftist writers (see Exiles from a Future Time and Trinity of Passion for the first two).

and:

Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives hosts a collection of scanned images of two important U.S. New Left/post-New Left journals, Radical America and Cultural Correspondence. The two journals, closely connected with the prolific historian of the left and left culture Paul Buhle, were among the more interesting intellectual by-products of Students for a Democratic Society.

Also, elsewhere:

Platypus: Ian Morrison: Trotsky’s Marxism // Lars T. Lih: October 1921: Lenin looks back

Principia Dialectica: Putting Counterfire’s John ‘Bonzo’ Rees to bed

Anthony Painter: The phone-hacking crisis calls for Ed Miliband to prove his dad wrong

The Free Voice of Labor:

Check out this fab doco on the American Yiddish anarchist paper Freie Arbeiter Stimme. Here is the blurb that goes with the video:

“The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists” traces the history of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper (Fraye Arbeter Shtime – The Free Voice of Labor) publishing its final issue after 87 years. Narrated by anarchist historian Paul Avrich, the story is mostly told by the newspaper’s now elderly, but decidedly unbowed staff. It’s the story of one of the largest radical movements among Jewish immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries, the conditions that led them to band together, their fight to build trade unions, their huge differences with the communists, their attitudes towards violence, Yiddish culture, and their loyalty to one another.

It is a pretty great story. What I would have liked to have seen would be the sites where tensions in such a movement lied. Where did the characters in this story depart in their politics? Where did they think their activism “worked” and where, with all that time to look back on the production of the paper, did they think they could have focused their energies more? [READ THE REST]

Below the fold, lots of rich material from Signalfire:

Memories of the Future-Class War Group 2009

“…proletarian revolutions (…) constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to … Continue reading →

Draft Program of the Union of Council Communists-1931

  1: The unification of the proletariat in the era of imperialism is only possible on the terrain of the final struggle against the capitalist system. The continuation of this system in whatever form threatens the human productive forces with … Continue reading →

Urban Operations in the Year 2020-NATO RTO TECHNICAL REPORT 71 (Extracts)

  THE FUTURE URBAN ENVIRONMENT 2.2    The Urban Environment 2.2.1  The Nature of the Urban Area The urban environment is complex and diverse and ranges from sophisticated, metropolis-style superstructures within a well-developed infrastructure, to high and low density urban shantytowns … Continue reading →

For Polish Workers the Path to Socialism is One of Armed Insurrection (1956)

Workers! Three years after insurrection in East Germany, the Polish proletariat has resorted to arms to defend its right to life and liberty. The workers who were beaten on the streets of Poznan and mown down by the armed tanks … Continue reading →

Speech At The Third Congress Of The Communist International-(Jan Appel 1921)

  Comrade Hempel [for the KAPD]: Comrades! After hearing the Report by Comrade Radek concerning the tactical line to be adopted by the Communist International, it is possible for us to declare our agreement with the first formulation put forward … Continue reading →

The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work: Theses (1921)

I. General Principles 1: The organisation of the Party must correspond to the conditions and the purpose of its activity. At every stage of the revolutionary class struggle and in the subsequent period of transition to socialism – the first … Continue reading →

Extracts from the Leading Principles of the KAI

  The Third International 1. The Third International is a Russian creation, a creation of the Russian Communist Party. It was created as a support for the Russian revolution, that is, for a revolution which was partly proletarian, partly bourgeois. … Continue reading →

THE PROGRAMME OF THE PARTY (1921)

  The Communist Party of Italy, Section of the Third (Communist) International, is constituted on the basis of the following principles. 1. Under the present social regime of capital, the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production …Continue reading →

The Transitional Program

    “Only the force of the proletarian State will be able to put systematically into effect the necessary measures for intervening in the relations of the social economy, by means of which the collective management of production and distribution … Continue reading →

Brazil court refuses to extradite Italian leftist rebel Cesare Battisti

Brazil‘s highest court has ruled against extraditing former Italian leftist guerrilla Cesare Battisti, who was convicted of four murders carried out in the late 1970s in his homeland. The supreme court’s ruling upheld a decision in December by then President … Continue reading →

Multiple Revolutions (1953)

1: The communist left clearly differentiates itself not only from eclectic party tacticians but also from the crude superficiality of those who reduce the entire struggle to a always and everywhere repeated dualism of two classes acting alone. The strategy … Continue reading→

The Immediate Program of the Revolution (1952)

1:With the resurgence of the movement which occurred on a world scale after the First World War and which was expressed in Italy by the founding of the PCI, it became clear that the most pressing question was the … Continue reading →

Construct the Red Army (1969)

The Red Army has been formed! The Revolutionary Army, the Red Army has been formed. The revolution is no longer referred to a distant future, it is in the present. The core of the Red Army launches an appeal to … Continue reading →

Theses on the right of nations to self-determination (1915)

1 The imperialist epoch is a period of the absorption of small states by large states and of a constant redrawing of the political map of the world towards greater state homogeneity. In this process of absorption many nations are … Continue reading →

Class war in Barcelona (1973)

Introduction to the Greek edition of 1974 (??) The Spanish State arrested in the end of September 1973 around ten revolutionaries, whom it presented as ‘gangsters’. Three of them are threatened with the death penalty. They could be sentenced … Continue reading→

The historical production of the revolution of the current period (from SIC)

I. The restructuring of capital and the present form of the capital relation The historical development of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital under real subsumption has led, today, to the period of crisis of the increasingly, and … Continue reading →

The Platform of the Communist International (1919)

The contradictions of the capitalist world system which were hidden deep within it have burst forth with tremendous force in a single huge explosion – the great imperialist world war. Capitalism tried to overcome its own anarchic nature by organising … Continue reading →

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