NOVEMBER, 2022 – To students of twentieth-century Russian history, the name Vladimir Il’ich Lenin is a constant, and inevitable, presence. But the name Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum—better known through the pseudonym “Iulii Martov”—is either entirely absent from view or present only as a mysterious, and often unsavoury, figure. Prior to the revolution of 1917, this would not have been the case. Boris Souvarine would until 1924 be a close collaborator with Lenin. But for Souvarine and others of his generation growing up in France, “Lenin was only an indistinct reference point. Very few people had even heard of him. Trotsky, Martov…
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OCTOBER, 2022 – On June 24, 2022, in a stunning reminder of the depth of the backlash against women’s rights, the United States Supreme Court officially reversed the historic Roe v. Wade ruling which provided legal protection for abortion rights in that country.[1] Within two weeks of the ruling, some half of all states in the US saw court filings and amended laws challenging the legal status of abortion.[2] There are far-reaching international implications of the US reversal of women’s right to choose, and the Canadian context cannot be assumed to be unaffected.[3] Importantly, in Canada, we have a long…
Leave a CommentDECEMBER, 2021 – When on the second day of January 1988 the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) was signed by representatives of Canada and the United States, 2,000 gathered in a protest march on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.[1] That march was one aspect of the movement against what at the time we called “free trade”[2] – a set of policies pushed by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Brian Mulroney in Canada, a phrase that came to symbolize the employers’ offensive in both countries, and in spite of considerable opposition, a policy which came into effect…
Leave a CommentNOVEMBER, 2021 – It was in 1974 that I first picked up a copy of The Gulag Archipelago. I didn’t finish reading it until this century. It is a very long book—seven books to be precise, published in three volumes that together run to roughly two thousand pages in English translation. But it shouldn’t take forty years to read a book, even a very long one. Why it took me four decades to finish reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s crowning achievement requires a little backstory and can serve as an entry point into the present book. The above is the first paragraph of…
Leave a CommentMAY, 2018 – Frustrated at what his friend Frederick Engels called the “peculiar product … known as ‘Marxism’ in France,” Karl Marx at one point declared “One thing for sure — me, I’m not a Marxist.”[1] If there were many reasons for Marx to be “not a Marxist” in the 19th century, the decades since have given us many more. The above is the first paragraph of “‘Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists’”. [2] The complete text can be found here. [1] Quoted in Frederick Engels, “Engels to Eduard Bernstein in Zurich [Letter],” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW),…
Comments closed25 janvier, 2017 – Chaque fois qu’un anniversaire d’importance de la Confédération approche, une attention considérable est accordée à l’histoire de la démocratie au Canada, la célébration prochaine des 150 ans de la Confédération canadienne en 2017 ne faisant pas exception. Or une préoccupation véritable pour notre avenir démocratique exige que nous examinions sérieusement cette histoire, en mettant en lumière ses limites et ses forces. Le rapport récemment paru de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada signale en outre une dimension nouvelle de cette question. Il existe en effet une histoire de la démocratie, peu souvent prise en…
Comments closedMARCH, 2016 – The overall aim of Peter Hudis in Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism is to unearth “the prefigurative”—the vision of a new post-capitalist world—from the writings of a Marx usually seen as agnostic on the question. The search for this prefigurative Marx raises an old issue: how do we reconcile the objective with the subjective, the objectively determined laws of motion in the economy with the emergence of a mass revolutionary subject? The above is the first paragraph of “The Ideal Immanent Within the Real: On Peter Hudis’ Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism”. [1]…
Comments closedAPRIL, 2013 – Finally, almost a century after the fact, the proceedings of the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Communist International are available in English, thanks to the diligent translation and careful scholarship of John Riddell. Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 – the latest in a multi-volume collection of documents from the years before, during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 – was made available to a limited audience in its 2011 hardback edition, and as of November 2012 in a much more affordable paperback version published by Haymarket Books.…
Comments closedIn the shadow of the economic crisis in Greece, inspired by Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Quebec’s “Maple Spring”, the 2012 edition of the Historical Materialism Conference in Toronto, was a resounding success. More than 400 people attended the 80-plus panels during an intensive three-day event stretching from Friday, May 11 through Sunday, May 13. Historical Materialism saw an important series of discussions on indigenous politics, involving eight sessions, a plenary and a Long Table discussion. There was a well-attended session on the relationship between Marxism and Feminism and several sessions on key issues in political economy. The complete program…
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Coalition building, Capitalism and War
Published March 31, 2017 by pkellogg
APRIL, 2017 – European civilization degenerated into horrifying violence during the “Great War” of 1914-1918. In the wake of that war, upheavals shook old empires to their foundations, as literally millions of peasants and workers rejected old patterns of life and rule, and sought out new ways of organizing society freed from the barbarism of war and capitalism. A vigorous left wing developed in many countries on the backs of this revolutionary upheaval, but only a fraction of the writings and discussions of this left have been available to an English-speaking audience. That is beginning to change. Ten years ago,…