Dérive

Konstantin Yuon New Planet (1921) Jack Conrad is a leading member of the CPGB-PCC and a frequent writer for the Weekly Worker . His 2022 three-part series describing Leon Trotsky's 'The Lessons of October' is of considerable interest given how central the work is in understanding the Russian Revolution from a Bolshevik's perspective. Jack contends that Trotsky's interpretation of events should be questioned and overcome. What follows is my reflection on the series.  Part 1: The history of 1917 is often used to justify sectarian existence: "if the Bolsheviks could do it, so can the chosen confessional sect or the broad left." this interpretation relies on a misrepresentation of the Bolshevik Party. 'The Lessons of October' is conventionally used to understand the Bolsheviks' program. Much of the left, even mainstream Communism (minus Trotsky's name) adhered to his account of events.  Trotsky claims that while the Bolsheviks did not seek to j...

Karl Marx did not invent the working class struggle. He did not invent the word “socialism” or the socialist movement. The industrial working class was already struggling by the 1830s, and there were, to use Hal Draper’s phrase, lots of “existing socialism” on the scene already. What Marx did do was ground the socialist movement in the very bedrock of bourgeois society. Class society is riddled with contradictions. These contradictions - between socialized production and the private accumulation of social surplus (capital); between the promises of bourgeois society (freedom and self-actualization through labor, fair exchange on the market) and the reality of industrial society (permanent unemployment, destitution, and death by overwork) - were and would continue to compel the working class to act. And when it did act, it had the potential, if organized into a political party and guided by socialist theory, to do nothing less than begin human history. Capitalism, understood Marx, is p...

  Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers By Nathaniel Flakin Pluto Press, $20.00. Martin Monath lived during tumultuous times; his short life intersected with events that included both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. He was, as author and translator Nathaniel Flakin explains, a “child of war and revolution” (p. 7). Monath lived several lives under a host of different names, made many friends (and many more enemies), and died twice. Reshaping Monath’s life through a variety of hard-to-find sources, Flakin expertly places the story of one man within the larger context of what the late Eric Hobsbaum termed the Age of Extremes . Monath’s door into Marxism and the struggle for proletarian emancipation was not an uncommon one for young Jewish men growing up Berlin. In 1917, the Balfour Agreement sealed Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Antisemitism — what August Bebel call...

Born are the beautiful children, hour by hour with brightest eyes, and loving hearts you have bestowed upon  fatherland, they will come, for bullets aren't the seeds of life.  - Mahjoub Sharif, Born are the Beautiful Children The Imprisoned Poet Famed activist and poet Mahjoub Sharif was imprisoned for the first time in 1970 by the National Revolutionary Command Council, chaired by the soon-to-be 15-year president of Sudan, Gaafar Nimeiry. The recipient of a Master’s Degree in Military Science from Fort Leavenworth, Nimeiry retained power until 1985, when one of many military coups (succeeded by one of many Transitional Military Councils) led to the rise of Ahmad Al-Mirghani in what is considered the last democratic election in the country’s tumultuous political history. Enter (via yet another military coup) the first of several starring characters: Omar al-Bashir, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation from 1989 to 1993, then president fr...