Skip to content

HALT ISRAEL/U.S. SLAUGHTER IN PALESTINE!

HALT ISRAEL/U.S. SLAUGHTER IN PALESTINE!

The following speech was made by Suzanne Weiss at a  Defend Palestine rally held in Toronto’s City Hall Square on December 2, 2023. The rally was called by Toronto4Palestine.

Stop US/Israel resumption of genocide on Palestine!

* For an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza
* Trudeau, end Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide
* Lift the siege on Gaza – end the Occupation!

We gather here today in great distress because US/Israel has resumed their full-scale genocide of the Palestinian people. The Israeli government goal, as they have repeated stated, is to rid the land of the Palestinian people.

Shamefully, Israel is led and financed by the US government. And Canada is complicit.

Why is the US government bankrolling Israel with $3.8 billion per year and now $14.5 billion more for the genocide this year?

Is it because American big business seeks control of the Middle East to reap profits from the land’s natural resources such as oil, and natural gas? Are genocide Israel and the big business US working together, each for its own goals?

I am a survivor of another genocide. Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews in Europe. He had similar goals. It was to secure colonial conquests and to rid the land of Jewish people.

The Nazis were racists much like the Zionists of the Israeli government. My mother died in the death camp of Auschwitz. I was saved by the Jewish Resistance. Many individuals helped me with acts of kindness, and I was hidden by an entire community.

It was world solidarity that defeated the Nazis. Solidarity of the world’s peoples will also help liberate the Palestinians.

Now the genocide has resumed with bombardments equivalent to two nuclear bombs since October 7. Supplies have been cut off – electricity, fuel, medications, food, and water, to starve the Palestinians. Israeli bombs and rockets have killed close to twenty thousand.

What should we do?

We must redouble our efforts. We should organize peaceful disruptions, sit-ins, occupations and other projects that educate and are inclusive of the masses who wish to unite for Palestinian freedom.

We must end government, corporate, and institutional complicity with Israel’s 75-year-old regime of apartheid. We must give meaningful solidarity to stop Israel’s genocide.

We should support the campaign for world boycott, divestment and sanctions. BDS gives us examples of meaningful actions that can make a difference on apartheid Israel’s economy and have an impact on genocide Israel.

* Major trade unions in India, in Belgium, in Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey have called on workers to boycott Israel products and refuse to handle Israeli cargo.

* Trade unions in Canada have signed on the Canadian Cease Fire Now statement. They have more to do.

* In the US, the United Auto Workers, a very large union, have joined the call for ceasefire now.

We call on Canada to stand for peace and for the protection of fundamental freedoms. Muslims are suffering violent acts of hate in their neighborhoods because of the US/Israeli genocide.

They need our solidarity.

Israel claims to represent the Jewish people. That is a lie! Judaism is not Zionism. Criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies is deceitfully labeled anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. In fact, many demonstrations are led by the Jews who defend the Palestinians and their rights to share the land in equality, dignity, and peace.

 

We are all under attack by big business government and its institutions, including big business media. We are not safe to freely discuss or express opposing opinions on Israel’s genocidal policies. We are not able to freely say that we support Palestinian freedom without risk of losing jobs.

We must condemn this world-wide witch-hunt and identify it as part of the governmental attack on Palestinian freedom. Let’s meet it head on and insist on free discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. University students and faculty are leading the way. Many high-school students are participating. We demand:

* An immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
* Trudeau, end Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide.
* Lift the siege on Gaza – End the Occupation!

Palestinian freedom is our freedom. It is freedom for humanity!

‘Let’s Rent a Train!’

A new feature-length video on the League for Socialist Action and the radicalization of the 1960s.

By John Riddell: A dramatic feature-length video is now available online portraying the achievements of the socialist movement in Canada sixty years ago.

Let’s Rent a Train! is a unique film portrayal of socialist activism in the 1960s, now available online at https://www.letsrentatrain.ca/.

The 93-minute film, created by Doug Williams and Darrel Furlotte, offers a mosaic of video clips from sixty participants in the League for Socialist Action (LSA/LSO), describing the League’s activities during the 1960s and 1970s.

The film’s title recalls a dramatic episode in the early days of the movement against the U.S.-led war in Vietnam and Canada’s complicity in the killing. Ian Angus recalls that when the idea of organizing a protest in Parliament Hill in Ottawa came up, “somebody said, ‘Why don’t we rent a train!’ We rented a train and took a trainload of people to Ottawa!”

Many protests in Canada demanded an end to Canadian complicity and withdrawal of the U.S. military from Vietnam. “We needed something very focused,” recalls Pam Dineen in Let’s Rent a Train! ; something “very clear on exactly what we wanted: Bring the boys home!”

Don Tapscott remembers vividly the response he heard from the Vietnamese themselves during Don’s visit to Vietnam: “Thank you! You made a difference.”

Let’s Rent a Train! also takes up the League’s campaign in the 1960s to win the right of free speech in Toronto’s parks. Before this victory, Toronto’s police were routinely arresting poets that ventured declaim poetry in Toronto’s Allen Gardens: “They read their poems and as one was arrested another would take his place, and it made the cops look stupid,” Ian Angus recalls. “It got national publicity.”

Gary Kinsman, co-author of The Canadian War on Queers, notes that, “It was through the Young Socialists [the LSA/LSO’s affiliated youth group] that I learned about the ‘we demand’ demonstration, the first gay rights demonstration on Parliament Hill. We had influence in the gay movement because of our experience as organizers.”

The LSA/LSO also intervened in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, created by the government Pierre Trudeau in 1967. The LSA submission covered all the main issues later raised by the women’s liberation movement.

A high proportion of LSA/LSO members were union members, and many of them worked in the educational sector. Liz Barkley recalls, “More and more teachers came to our fraction, that is, the group of teachers who were organized in the LSA, to get oriented on what to do.”

LSA/LSO members were also a dynamic force in building solidarity with Cuba through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and in building a socialist caucus within the New Democratic Party.

Let’s Rent a Train! also describes the League’s initiative during the imposition of War Measures Act in 1970, when the Pierre Trudeau government suspended civil rights in Canada on the pretext of kidnappings in Quebec. Let’s Rent a Train! records that the LSA/LSO organized a protest in front of army barracks in Montreal, in which I took part, demanding repeal of the War Measures Act.

Participants displayed posters calling for withdrawal of Canadian army from Quebec and handed out French-language leaflets and posters. The action was a calculated provocation to prove that such initiatives could be carried out with success.

The film includes an apt summary of the LSA/LSO approach by Ernie Tate (1934–2021): “We were prepared to do what was necessary, with some imagination, to break through the old sectarian practices and to meet the political needs of the working class at that time.”

Let’s Rent a Train! can be viewed online at https://www.letsrentatrain.ca/.

Amilcar Cabral: A Pan-African Revolutionary

The relevance of his praxis for Africa in a world undergoing geopolitical reconfiguration

By Ameth LO, Pan-African militant and Member of GRILA (www.grila.org), Toronto Dakar June 20th, 2022.

The renewed general interest in Pan-Africanism among young people, and interest in the work of Cabral in particular, can be largely explained by the urgency of current issues confronting Africa and the world. In West Africa, these issues present themselves as a skilfully orchestrated redeployment of imperialism in collusion with elite heads of state through a violent process of monopolising resources and agricultural lands by multinational corporations.

Ultimately, the success of elites in these endeavours call into question the fundamental goals of liberation struggles and independence movements; particularly the right of African people to reclaim their means of production as a precondition for self-directed development.

The sub-region is at the center of major dislocations (jihadism, inter-imperialist rivalries, the collapse of democratic states, and so on) which threaten the stability of all of Africa. At the heart of these struggles are issues linked to the trafficking of narcotics given new drug trafficking routes from Latin America to Europe. But there is also the emergence of new conflicts such as those currently underway in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and so on. These conflicts involve multiple actors such as the USA, France, Jihadist networks, drug traffickers and others who have some interests that coincide, but others that diverge particularly around the fundamental issue of control of the immense natural resource of the region such as gold, oil, uranium, and the potential for setting up a strategic operating base in the region. Another issue of concern relates to the structures of a global capitalist system in crisis, and based on a consumption model that increasingly demands the energy and mining resources of which Africa abounds.

Today, fifty years after Cabral’s death, it is clear that the persistence of these issues shows that the national liberation movement, led by African nationalists such as Cabral, has not reached its objectives despite its significant progress. Security issues persist, urban-rural inequality is growing, creating a double movement. On the one hand, there is a massive rural exodus of peasants to the cities in search of better living conditions. On the other hand, directionless African youth are tempted by the mirage of the West to make sometimes suicidal attempts to traverse the desert or the oceans to emigrate to the Global North.

But how did we get here despite the enormous sacrifices made by leaders such as Cabral to free their people from all forms of domination and exploitation? Which factors stalled the transformation of national liberation into true social revolution? Which factors internal to Africa have favoured the systematic elimination of revolutionary leaders like Cabral who had led these movements? How can we interpret Cabral’s political vision in light of current issues facing Africa and the world?

A set of questions that should be reflected on in order to draw lessons from the past (but not to take pleasure in it as Professor Cheikh Anta DIOP said) but to guide future struggles with greater clarity and precision. We will try to explore Cabral’s vision through several reflections he produced in the context of struggle against Portuguese colonialism and imperialism more broadly. Themes such as: the role of culture in the national liberation movement, the problem of class struggle in Africa, and how to go beyond the stage of national independence through social, economic and cultural revolution; only a multi-pronged revolution can support the many aspirations of African people.

Ameth LO

The Communist Manifesto at 175

By John Riddell: I made the presentation that follows on 26 February to a webinar organized by the International Manifesto Group to mark the 175th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The  International Manifesto Group is a solidarity collective based in Winnipeg and chaired by Radhika Desai.

Other speakers on this panel were:

  • Cheng Enfu and Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. For a link to their written contribution, see footnote #2;
  • Sara Flounders, Contributing Editor of the US communist newspaper Workers’ World and a key anti-war organiser for decades;
  • Alexander Buzgalin of Moscow State University;
  • Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER coalition and a central leader of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the US;
  • Frank Chapman, Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Central Committee member of the US communist group Freedom Road Socialist Organisation; and
  • Xin Yuzhou, a member of the Communist Youth League working in the International Department of the Communist Party of China.

My talk was first posted by Carlos Martinez on the website of the Friends of Socialist China. A video of full event can be viewed on YouTube.

Presentation by John Riddell

“Workers of the world, unite!” This celebrated call, first voiced by Marx and Engels almost two centuries ago, continues today to resound worldwide in the struggles of working people seeking political and social liberation….

Read more…

Sankara: ‘Better One Step Forward with the People’

Thomas Sankara: ‘Better One Step Forward with the People Than Ten Steps Without!’
The following historic speech by President Thomas Sankara was delivered in 1983 in New Delhi, India. Sankara, the leader of a popular revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso, was assassinated 45 years ago in a foreign-backed coup d’etat. The text of his speech and the introductory paragraphs are reproduced from The Internationalist, a publication of the “Progressive International.”

Sankara was a socialist revolutionary and pan-Africanist. Inspired by the worker-led Madagascan uprising he had witnessed as an officer, Sankara launched programs for social, ecological and economic change…..

His government vaccinated 2,500,000 children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles in just a few weeks. His literacy campaign increased the number of people who could read from 13% in 1983 to 73% in 1987. His land redistribution programme was so successful that wheat production increased more than 200% during his presidency.

In 1983, four years before his assassination, Sankara took the stage at the 7th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in New Delhi and delivered a speech that is widely regarded as a seminal moment in his presidency. This Special Issue of The Internationalist translates Sankara’s speech from its original French and reproduces it in abridged form.

If you want to receive speeches, essays, and critical analysis from around the world, we invite you to subscribe to The Internationalist and support our efforts to make solidarity more than a slogan.

Madam President, Excellencies, Heads of State and Government, Honourables, Delegates, ….

Read more…

Remembering George Bryant 1931–2022

The socialist movement lost a long-time organizer and master builder with the death on December 26, 2022, of George Bryant, at the age of 91. George and his life partner Bea Bryant were influential figures in the Ontario socialist movement from the 1950s. Bea Bryant died in 2016 (see A Life for Socialism).

Working from their home in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, George and Bea set the pace in community-based social-movement organizing. They were instrumental in rallying opposition to Canada’s role in the U.S.-led war against Vietnam and in building solidarity with socialist Cuba.

In recent decades, George and Bea lived in the village of Dealtown in southwest Ontario, while maintaining links with socialist and antiwar activists in Chatham, Detroit, and Toronto.

Largely self-educated, George grew up in a working-class community in Toronto. In the 1940s he became active in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of today’s NDP; he met Bea at a square dance at St. Andrews United Church in Toronto. George quickly discovered a shared commitment with Bea to progressive social action. “George was a feminist, even then,” Bea later commented. “He felt that I had as much right to get into politics as he had.”

George’s friend from that time, Ernie Tate, recalls that George “worked at renovating homes to make a living, but his real passion was photography and documentary film making, having worked with John Grierson on documentary film making at the National Film Board.”[1]

George and Bea gravitated to the CCF’s left wing, and linked up with some other CCF leftists in forming the League for Socialist Action (LSA). In 1958 they joined the effort to launch a new labour-based left political party, which was born in 1961 as the New Democratic Party (NDP). George, Bea, and their young son David marked these events by joining in a tour to revolutionary Cuba.

The Cuba trip deeply affected their subsequent course, Bea later recalled. “We stayed at a hotel in Havana that had just been taken over by the workers. There was a sign on the hotel, ‘Free territory of Cuba.’ It was filled with brigadistas (young participants in Cuba’s great literacy campaign), with their little lanterns, going out to teach in the countryside.”

“When we came back I gave a talk on Cuba,” Bea added. “That was a public forum with quite a few people there, organized by the [Richmond Hill] Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” This fledgling effort won attention among left activists across the country.

Three years later, George and Bea took a similar initiative in response to the  U.S. war in Vietnam, which aimed to crush an uprising for national liberation. Committees to end the war sprang up across Canada, and George and Bea’s initiative in Richmond Hill stood out in terms of originality and impact.

At that time it was common for charities to raise funds by holding “tag days” on street corners and in malls across the community. “Just the thing,” thought Bea and George. “We’ll have a tag day to assist the victims of the Vietnam war.” The York Committee to End the War in Vietnam applied to the local authorities for a tag day permit. They were met by a curt refusal.

The York Committee appealed for reconsideration. Support poured in from across the community, including from local resident Pierre Berton, then Canada’s best-known English-language writer. In the end, the abashed city council gave way. The dust-up in little Richmond Hill made the news across Canada and beyond.

Over the years, George worked at many jobs, most of them in carpentry, a field in which he was an expert craftsman. This skill carried over readily to his political work, where he was called upon to fix up and rebuild socialist movement bookstores, meeting halls, and offices in Toronto and beyond.

George’s carpentry skills were applied to a particularly ambitious project in the late 1960s, when a League for Socialist Action member acquired a vacation property north of Deseronto, Ontario, and invited the LSA to use it for educational purposes. George designed and managed construction of a fine meeting and dining hall and accompanying tent floors and cabins. The centre was named Camp Poundmaker, after the renowned Indigenous leader of the late 1800s. Many weekend discussion circles and recreational evenings were held there on summer evenings.

The LSA was then expanding rapidly, and it was hoped that the League would grow into full utilization of this handsome property. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and the League’s leading role in Camp Poundmaker did not survive a spate of factional discord in the 1970s.

During the 1980s, I lived in New York City and had little touch with George and Bea. On my return to Canada I found the situation vastly changed. George and Bea had moved to Dealtown, in south-west Ontario. George rebuilt their little Dealtown home, with sculpted flower beds, raised to ease Bea’s work as master gardener. The large south-facing window looked into a little pond designed to attract the birds and comfort the resident goldfish. Their son, David, lived close by.

After many years of separation, close-knit family life was restored. Bea and George worked closely with social activists in nearby Chatham and Detroit.

George and Bea were convinced ecologists, long before this approach came to be widely shared among political activists. These convictions found expression in all the Bryants’ varied activities in and around Dealtown.

As always, George and Bea’s actions pointed to the road ahead.

By John Riddell, Toronto

 

[1]. Ernest Tate, Revolutionarya Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir, vol. 1, p. 29.

Remembering George Bryant 1932–2022

 

The socialist movement lost a long-time organizer and master builder with the death on December 26, 2022, of George Bryant at the age of 91. George and his life partner Beatrice Bryant were influential figures in the Ontario socialist movement from the 1950s. Bea Bryant died in 2016 (see A Life for Socialism).

Working from their home in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, George and Bea set the pace in community-based social-movement organizing. They were instrumental in rallying opposition to Canada’s complicity in the U.S.-led war against Vietnam and in building solidarity with socialist Cuba.

In their later years, George and Bea lived in the village of Dealtown in southwest Ontario, while maintaining links with socialist and antiwar activists in Chatham, Detroit, and Toronto.

Largely self-educated, George grew up in a working-class community in Toronto. In the 1940s he became active in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of today’s NDP.

Ernie Tate, who met George in the 1950s, recalled that George “worked at renovating homes to make a living, but his real passion was photography and documentary film making.” George had worked with John Grierson on documentary film making at the National Film Board,” Ernie reports. [1]

George met Bea at a square dance at St. Andrews United Church in Toronto. George and Bea quickly discovered a shared commitment to progressive social action. “George was a feminist, even then,” Bea later commented. “He felt that I had as much right to get into politics as he had.”

George and Bea gravitated to the CCF’s left wing, and linked up with some other CCF leftists in forming the League for Socialist Action (LSA). In 1958 George and Bea joined the effort to launch a new labour-based left political party, which was born in 1961 as the New Democratic Party (NDP). George, Bea, and their young son David joined in a tour that year to revolutionary Cuba.

The Cuba trip deeply affected their subsequent course, Bea later recalled. “We stayed at a hotel in Havana that had just been taken over by the workers. There was a sign on the hotel, ‘Free territory of Cuba.’ It was filled with brigadistas (young participants in Cuba’s great literacy campaign), with their little lanterns, going out to teach in the countryside.”

“When we came back I gave a talk on Cuba,” Bea added. “That was a public forum with quite a few people there, organized by the [Richmond Hill] Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” This fledgling effort won attention among left activists across the country.

Three years later, George and Bea took a similar initiative in response to the  U.S. war in Vietnam, which aimed to crush an uprising for national liberation. Committees to end the war sprang up across Canada.

George and Bea took an initiative in Richmond Hill on the Vietnam war issue that stood out in terms of originality and impact.

At that time it was common for charities to raise funds by holding “tag days” on street corners and in malls across the community. “Just the thing,” thought Bea and George. “We’ll have a tag day to assist the victims of the Vietnam war.” The York Committee to End the War in Vietnam applied to the local authorities for a tag day permit. They were met by a curt refusal.

The York Committee appealed for reconsideration. Support poured in from across the community, including from local resident Pierre Berton, then Canada’s best-known English-language writer. In the end, the abashed city council gave way. The dust-up in Richmond Hill made the news across Canada and beyond.

Over the years, George worked at many jobs, most of them in carpentry, a field in which he was an expert craftsman. This skill carried over readily to his political work, where he was called upon to fix up and rebuild socialist movement bookstores, meeting halls, and offices in Toronto and beyond.

George’s carpentry skills were applied to a particularly ambitious project in the late 1960s, when a League for Socialist Action member acquired a vacation property north of Deseronto, Ontario, and invited the LSA to use it for educational purposes. George designed and managed construction of a fine meeting and dining hall and accompanying tent floors and cabins. The centre was named Camp Poundmaker, after the renowned Indigenous leader of the late 1800s. Many weekend discussion circles and recreational evenings were held there on summer evenings.

The LSA was then expanding rapidly, and it was hoped that the League would grow into full utilization of this handsome property. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and the League’s leading role in Camp Poundmaker did not survive a spate of factional discord in the 1970s.

During the 1980s, I lived in New York City and had little touch with George and Bea. On my return to Canada I found the situation vastly changed. George and Bea had moved to Dealtown, in south-west Ontario. George rebuilt their little Dealtown home, with sculpted flower beds, raised to ease Bea’s work as master gardener. The large south-facing window looked into a little pond designed to attract the birds and comfort the resident goldfish.

Their son, David, lived close by. After many years of separation, close-knit family life was restored. Bea and George worked closely with social activists in nearby Chatham and Detroit.

George and Bea were convinced ecologists, long before this approach came to be widely shared among left-wing activists. These convictions found expression in all the Bryants’ varied activities in and around Dealtown.

As always, George and Bea’s actions pointed to the road ahead.

By John Riddell, Toronto

 

 

[1]. Ernest Tate, Revolutionarya Activism in the 1950s & 60s A Memoir, vol. 1, p. 29.

The Second International’s Conflicted Legacy

Second International Congress 1904

By Mike Taber: Virtually all socialists today are direct descendants of the Second International of 1889 to 1914.  Also known as the Socialist International, this movement grouped the greater part of the world’s organized working class under the banner of socialist revolution, and was viewed by capitalists everywhere as a threat to their existence. Yet relatively few twenty-first-century socialists know much about this organization’s history or what it represented.


Editor’s note: This text has also been published by Monthly Review Online


For left-wing socialists in particular, the Second International is often associated almost exclusively with its betrayal of internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War. At that time the Second International suffered an ignominious collapse, as its leading parties abandoned socialist principles and gave open support to their respective governments’ war efforts.

The fact that the Second International was re-created in 1919 as a formation committed to maintaining the capitalist order, with a few reforms, has contributed to such an image. Not only did the post-1919 Second International oppose the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, but it worked energetically to suppress the revolutionary wave that engulfed much of Europe and Asia following the end of the war.  Its social-democratic successors have largely continued along these lines up to the present day.

This image of the pre-1914 Second International helps explain the fact that prior to the publication of my book, Under the Socialist Banner, the resolutions of its nine congresses had never before been assembled and published in English. Some of these resolutions were virtually unknown. Many had been exceedingly difficult to even find.

While there are good reasons to reject what the Second International became after 1914, ignoring or downplaying its legacy is nevertheless a mistake. Doing so means turning one’s back on an important part of the socialist movement’s history and traditions. Moreover, it means ceding this legacy to social-democratic currents that have betrayed or distorted socialism’s message for over a century. The best of this legacy, however, legitimately belongs to revolutionary socialists. Understanding the Second International’s strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions can be of major benefit for the movement today. Read more…

The Comintern’s Twenty-One Conditions, 1920


Editor’s Note on the 21 Conditions

During 1920, a wide range of socialist parties and currents were considering affiliation to the newly formed Communist International. Many of these formations were still mired, in their policies and practices, in the weaknesses of the Second International, which had collapsed at the outset of the World War in 1914.

Capitalism in Europe was still deeply shaken by the impact of world war and post-war crisis.

When the Communist International gathered for its first full congress in July 1920, many delegates raised the need to establish criteria for membership in the new International.

Giacomo Serrati – a leader of the centrist current in the Comintern’s Italian section – told the Congress that no tool yet existed – no “sincerometer” – to measure the sincerity of would be Comintern members.

Lenin retorted that “we already have an instrument for defining tendencies,” referring no doubt to the program of Marxism.

Nonetheless, the congress set up a commission to draft written standards. The result was a short list, the “Twenty-One Conditions,” which proved to be instrumental in the International’s subsequent expansion and consolidation. The first 19 conditions were drafted by Lenin; Theses 20 and 21 were developed in a commission during the World Congress. The Twenty-One Conditions appear here on line for the first time in searchable form. Read more…

Socialist Viewpoints on War in Ukraine

In his presentation to the London-based Online Communist Forum – printed on this website (“Debates in the Second International”) – Mike Taber made the following statement on Ukraine, drawing parallels to Second International debates on the question of militarism and war:

“Consistent with the approach that revolutionary socialists took following 1914, one can completely oppose and condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while at the same time refusing to give an ounce of support to the forces of the Ukrainian capitalist regime and its US and NATO backers. Above all, socialists within the United States and other imperialist countries should see as their number-one task to oppose the war moves of their own government.”

That statement elicited several comments by readers, along with a response to these by Taber. Given the importance of the question, we thought it best to separate these comments out into a separate post, beginning with Taber’s response.


By Mike Taber

Here is my response to various points raised in the exchange. Read more…

Debates in the Second International

The following is an edited version of a talk given at the Online Communist Forum, based in London UK, on 27 March 2022. In it Mike Taber discusses a new book he is preparing, to be published by Haymarket Books.

By Mike Taber: Thanks for the invitation to speak at the Online Communist Forum. Some of you will remember my forum here two years ago, when I spoke about Under the Socialist Banner, then in preparation. That book helped provide a clearer and more rounded picture of what the Second International of 1889–1914 actually was, as registered in its adopted congress resolutions. 

It also posed the way the Second International is viewed today by both right-wing and left-wing socialists. Most contemporary social democrats think there was too much Marxism in the pre-1914 Second International, not enough political realism, as they see it. For their part, many left-wing socialists and communists tend to think either that the Second International was fundamentally flawed from the outset, or else they simply don’t give it a lot of attention.

What such views have in common is that they tend to look at the Second International as a thing, a historical object. Not as a movement. And like any living mass movement, it had its own strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions that need to be studied and assessed accurately and in context. Read more…

‘Fascinating Material’ on Pre-1914 Socialist International

The following review was first published in Marx and Philosophy and is reposted with permission. Mike Taber’s 220-page collection of resolutions of the Second International is available as a paperback from Haymarket Books with bundled ebook for US$13.26. Page references are to the Haymarket edition.

By Daniel Gaido: Mike Taber has edited for the first time the resolutions adopted between 1889 and 1912 by the nine congresses celebrated by the Socialist International, which is also known as the Second International. This scholarly edition involved a considerable work of translation: the official proceedings of the congresses were published in German (all nine) and French (six of them), and only one congress had its proceedings published in English (the London Congress of 1896).

Besides providing English versions of all the resolutions in chronological order, the editor has accompanied them with an exceedingly useful critical apparatus. Taber’s Introduction provides an overview of the general characteristics and development tendencies of the Second International, its accomplishments and strengths as well as its weaknesses and contradictions, and finally its legacy and contemporary relevance. The critical apparatus also includes shorter introductions to each one of the nine congresses, expounding key debates within each congress, together with an Afterword on the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and an Appendix on several unapproved resolutions. Read more…

Clara Zetkin on the Path to Workers’ Power

Address to the Fifth Comintern Congress, 1924

Edited by Bob Schwarz: The following extended address by Clara Zetkin to the Communist International’s fifth congress (1924) presents the most rounded defense by a Marxist leader of the call for a workers’ united front, which the International had adopted in 1921.  Toward the end of Part 2 of this address, she provided a compact explanation of the “workers’ government” concept, probably the most precise left to us from the Comintern’s early years.

Zetkin’s speech was delivered 24 June 1924, at the 11th session of the fifth congress, during discussion of Grigorii Zinoviev’s opening address, “Report on the Work of the Executive Committee.”[1]

This English translation of Clara Zetkin’s speech is taken from International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr) issue no. 47 (23 July 1924) pp. 485–8. The transcript of Zetkin’s speech published in Inprecorr (English edition) is reproduced with light editing after comparison with the German-language stenographic transcript printed at the time in Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, no. 85 (1924), pp. 1066–1070.

Zetkin’s address has been divided here into two sections of roughly equal length:

  1. October 1923: Zetkin Assesses a Communist Bid for Power
  2. 1924: Zetkin Reviews the Comintern’s Failed “October”

Read more…

Zhang Tailei: ‘Thunderstorm’ of China’s Revolution

Zhang Tailei

The following short biography of an early Chinese Communist was first published in Friends of Socialist China with the following introduction.

In this paper, presented at the Fifteenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE), held 18-19 December 2021 at the Shanghai International Studies University and online, John Riddell introduces the life of an early pioneer and martyr of the Chinese revolution, honoured in his own country, but who deserves to be better known internationally.

John, a lifelong socialist activist, is the founding editor of the Comintern Publishing Project and probably the foremost contemporary scholar of the early Communist International (Comintern) working in the English language. He has translated and edited numerous volumes of Comintern proceedings. We are grateful to him for making his paper available to us. – Friends of Socialist China.

By John Riddell: To understand the rise of China, it is helpful to get acquainted with the life and work of lesser-known figures who contributed to the liberation struggle. Such an activist is Zhang Tailei (1898–1927), whom I learned of while translating the proceedings of a global Communist congress held in 1921.[1] Read more…

The ‘German October’ of 1923: A Failed Bid for Workers’ Power

The text that follows will be included in a new collection, Lenin’s Comintern Revisited, scheduled for publication in 2022.

Hyperinflation: A trillion-mark banknote in Germany, 1923

By John Riddell: On 11 January 1923, France and Belgium sent their armies to occupy the Ruhr region, the industrial heartland of Germany. The invaders’ stated goal was to extract the reparations payments imposed on Germany in the 1919 Versailles treaty that ended World War I.

The French-Belgian occupation pushed Germany into a political and economic crisis that deepened as the year progressed, propelling the German working class toward revolutionary action.

In October 1923, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) launched an insurrectionary bid for power – an attempt to repeat the Bolshevik victory of October 1917 that became known to historians as the “German October.” The failure of this attempt led to widespread dismay in the KPD, an outcome that helped tip the Comintern as a whole into a process of retreat and decline.[1] Read more…