Every so often we need to check our own political assumptions in order to critically evaluate our conduct in relation to what is currently going on. We also need to examine the behaviour of those who believe they are the repositories of who-knows-what coherence, with principles and methods that should […]
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The Red Army, Karl Radek
This 1918 article criticises the formation of the Red Army as a replacement of the Red Guard militia, a crucial turning point in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
Capitalism’s New Economy, ICT
An article published in 2005 by the CWO, dealing with the ‘new economy’ of capitalism based on finance and services, using the UK as a case study.
Against the concept of the “brilliant leader”, ICC
In politics, there’s nothing new in a group radically changing its way of seeing and acting once it has become a big organisation, a mass party. One could cite several examples of such metamorphoses. One could to some extent apply it to the Bolshevik party after the revolution. But what’s […]
The Massacre of Barcelona — A Lesson for the Workers of Mexico, GTM
Introduction: The Mexican Communist Left appears after the bloody week of Barcelona in May 1937. It comes from a leftist split from Trotskyism against Trotsky’s politics of entryism in the socialist or “workers” parties. In the United States, the League of Revolutionary Workers was born in 1935. Hugo Oehler is the most famous figure […]
Amadeo Bordiga – Beyond the Myth and the Rhetoric, Damen
Our party has never made a fetish of Bordiga. Even when he was alive we openly disagreed with some of his principles, but mainly with the way his ideas were deformed by more than a few of his epigones when making use of his name. We are thus in better […]
The Democratic Mystification, Jacques Camatte
An article published in the journal ‘Invariance’ in 1969, outlining the left-communist opposition to bourgeois democracy. Originally intended to be part of a much larger work, which was never completed.
What is Legitimacy? Hayts
We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and War (1915) What is Legitimacy? Much is made about the distinction between legitimate […]
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
Debord’s 1967 work of analysis of culture under capitalism, and criticism of previous Marxists – positing that they functioned as part of the same spectacle of capitalism.
The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg
A 1906 work in which Luxemburg argues for the importance of the mass strike in overthrowing capitalism.