It’s a massively neglected historical topic and one that will fascinate anybody with an interest in Marxism. How Trotskyism grew in the United States, intervening in trade union disputes, falling out with pro-Stalin communists, fighting fascism, and having many run-ins… Read More ›
Forty years ago, I was engulfed in the heady politics of Liverpool as the city fought a vigorous campaign against the Thatcher Tory government. Spearheading that campaign, adding ideological rigour, was the Militant tendency, a Marxist-Leninist organisation of which I… Read More ›
How has society moved on from the slave states of the ancient world to medieval feudalism and then on to industrial capitalism and where we are today? Well, Karl Marx described the process through his theory of historical materialism. Don’t… Read More ›
The simple answer to the headline is – brutally. For barely two months in 1871, a radical socialist government took control of Paris determined to set up a working-class republic. Hardly surprising, the French ruling class decided that was a… Read More ›
If you think the far Right is tough on migrants today, it’s worth looking back at how British communists talked about Polish exiles at the end of the Second World War. The language was hostile and uncompromising. But why were… Read More ›
At the height of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and United States, in the 1950s, a communist state tried to throw off the Soviet yoke. Workers and students in Hungary began a revolution, hoping that the Kremlin would… Read More ›
As a teenager in the late 1970s, who was very into politics, I met somebody who had been to Albania, then a communist country. What a strange place! Young people were forbidden to wear jeans and grow their hair long…. Read More ›
Communism and Islam moved closer together in the former Russian empire in the period after 1917 but the alliance didn’t last
Are Islamism and Marxism reconcilable or are they aiming for very different and contradictory outcomes? Tony McMahon investigates
