History

October 15th is the anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966. We reprint here an article written before the murder of George Floyd, but whose lessons remain even more valid today.

Leon Pinsky, Socialist Alternative (ISA in the US) September saw the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the movement which opened a new chapter in the history of social struggle in the U.S. A decade later, we can appreciate the importance of Oc...

The world changed twenty years ago. It’s rare that a single event like the 9/11 terrorist attack in the USA can have that much impact. But of course it wasn’t just an act of terror which altered the course of history. Rather it was the response to it

August 19th 1991 — an 8-man junta announced that the head of the Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had been taken ill, and an ‘Emergency Committee’ had taken over running the vast country. The defeat of the putsch opened the road to the collapse of the USSR.

It’s 50 years ago since Henry Kissinger’s secret mission to China which led to a ground-breaking shift in US imperialism’s foreign policy and changed the course of history

The events in Kronstadt in March 1921 are exploited by critics of Bolshevism — whether anarchists or from the pro-capitalist right — in an attempt to demonstrate that not only under Stalin, but already under Lenin’s and Trotsky’s leadership a brutal dictatorship ruled over the workers in the new Soviet Russia.

Today, environmental degradation and economic crisis make it clear to many people that capitalism offers us no future, as many new mass movements show. What they lack is an organization and leadership that has internalized the hard lessons from Rosa Luxemburg’s struggles and many other past failed revolutions. This, plus the living experiences of new movements, are the basis for developing a revolutionary program to overcome capitalism in our time. We have made it our task to build such an organization with the ISA.

Antonio Gramsci is certainly one of the most popular Marxist thinkers, and is considered one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. In recent years, his ideas have been particularly studied and appreciated by the Latin American left, as they look to the political legacy of this Sardinian revolutionary. Even in Italy today, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), the figure of Gramsci is making a comeback.

150 years ago this month, history was made when working-class Parisians established the Paris Commune on 18 March 1871. This represented the first example of a society run by and for the working class — a workers’ state.

In August 1980, Poland’s Stalinist regime was rocked by a massive strike wave which swept across the country Paul Newberry, Socialist Alternative (ISA in Poland) Arguably, Poland came closest to a successful workers’ revolt against Stalini...