Features

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.

In the second of our two-part article on Chinese imperialism, we wrote: “The huge network of concentration camps, disappearances, torture, rape and more in Xinjiang, directed against the Uighur and mostly Muslim population, are not made up, but are the harsh reality.” Pro-authoritarian so-called lefts have attacked our article.

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

Socialists should be friendly and understanding of MMT’s appeal, but firm in pointing out its weakness as a bourgeois theory which does not recognize the limitations of the capitalist system itself.

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.

For socialists, taxing private wealth is not enough, the key question is the ownership of wealth. To take real power over the economy, the nationalisation of big business is necessary, under democratic control by workers and poor, and in real international cooperation.

Today in China, the CCP uses fascistic brutal repressive methods against workers in struggle and other expressions of opposition in China. In Xinjiang, the state campaign against Uighurs combines brutal measures to exterminate their culture, language and religion, with settler colonialism. This is China’s state capitalist imperialism.

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.