To honor the contributions of Fidel Castro to the world revolutionary movement, below are three short excerpts by him from 1961, at the time of the U.S.-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The fall of the regime of Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, opened up a period of sustained popular mobilization throughout Cuba. Led by Fidel Castro and a broad team of July 26 Movement cadres, over the next two years Cuban working people carried out one of the most profound revolutionary transformations in modern history.
Resisting the U.S.-organized Bay of Pigs invasion, April 1961
Encouraged by the revolutionary government, working people and peasants organized and mobilized on many levels: in armed militia units, in block-by-block defense organizations; in trade unions; in women’s organizations and youth organizations. Through its organized power, the Cuban working class was the conscious force that eliminated institutionalized racism; implemented radical urban and agrarian reforms; made initial steps to bring about women’s emancipation; established workers’ control of factories and enterprises; and ultimately carried out the definitive nationalization of domestic- and foreign-owned capital throughout the country. Read more…
In the Autumn 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine George Martell argues that “the Leap Manifesto offers a genuine opportunity to move beyond social democracy — to directly face up to capitalism — if we are prepared to take the Manifesto’s demands seriously.”
Martell’s thoughtful essay is followed by responses from activists representing a variety of viewpoints, including the following contribution by John Riddell and Ian Angus. Ian Angus is editor of Climate & Capitalism and an activist with Sustainable North Grenville. John Riddell, a historian of the socialist movement, is active in Toronto East End Against Line 9.—Climate&Capitalism
Abstract: This article reexamines the perspectives on the state and revolution advocated by the early Karl Kautsky and revolutionary social democrats across the Tsarist Empire. Contrary to a common misconception, these “orthodox” Marxists rejected the possibility of a peaceful and gradualist utilization of the capitalist state for socialist transformation. I show that Second International “orthodoxy” proved to be a sufficiently radical political foundation for the Bolsheviks and Finnish socialists to lead the Twentieth century’s first anti-capitalist seizures of power.
The triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 gave rise to widespread solidarity work in the U.S. and Canada, organized through Fair Play for Cuba committees. Two participants in this experience report here on its scope and lessons.
John Riddell and Suzanne Weiss gave the following joint talk on the work of Fair Play for Cuba on July 31, 2016, at a conference of Ideas Left Outside at Elbow Lake, Ontario. For other writings on Fair Play for Cuba, see below.
John Riddell: On September 2, 1960, one million Cubans gathered in Havana in a General Assembly of the Cuban people to hear and approve Cuba’s reply to U.S. attacks on its sovereignty. This statement, known as the First Declaration of Havana, pledged Cuba to nothing less than a hemispheric struggle for freedom from U.S. domination. Read more…
Introduction by John Riddell: 100 years ago today, Käte Duncker, a leading antiwar socialist in Germany explained the need for revolution to end the First World War. Her audience was delegates to the last unified national conference of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), held in Berlin on September 21-23, 1916.
The vote by SPD parliamentary representatives in support of German war spending on August 4, 1914, had split the party. At the September 1916 conference, the right-wing pro-war Majority Socialists were opposed by the Working Group (later USPD – a centrist grouping), as well as by the revolutionary current, the International Group (later the Spartacus League), led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In November 1918, supporters of the USPD and Spartacus League led a workers’ revolution that overturned the German emperor and brought the war to an abrupt end. Read more…
By John Riddell. The Federal New Democratic Party has sent its constituency groups a detailed guide to the Leap Manifesto, which compares the Manifesto’s provisions with adopted NDP policies. The manual is a response to a decision by the party’s April 2016 convention to adopt the Manifesto as a basis for discussion.
A balance sheet of the movement to block the cross-Toronto ‘Line 9’ pipeline project.
With notes on the meaning of “climate justice” and the relationship of socialism to social movements.
By John Riddell. Umair Muhammad’s post on my blog, “Let’s commit to the long haul,” reviews the record of an anti-pipeline movement in which both he and I have been active. He concludes that “while we were good at organizing efforts against particular harmful projects and initiatives, we did not have a broader strategy for social change.”
Umair criticizes today’s activists for their “tepidness about power” and challenges us to “work with institutional forms that can deliver protracted challenges to the status quo.” In short, he asks us to set the goal of building a movement to take and exercise power. Read more…
To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Edited by John Riddell. Haymarket Books, 2015, 1,299 pages, $55
The following review by Jennifer Roesch first appeared in issue #101 of International Socialist Review and is reprinted by permission. In addition to her extensive discussion of the Third Congress proceedings, Jennifer Roesch offers an original interpretation of the congress’s outcome. – JR
By Jennifer Roesch. With the publication of To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, John Riddell has translated the entire proceedings of the first four congresses of the Comintern.1 These four congresses embody the experiences and debates of the revolutionary period that opened with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and closed with the final defeat of the German Revolution in 1923.
Clara Zetkin
The attempt to bring the revolutionary forces together into a single world party with national detachments that could generalize strategies and tactics and lead the struggle against world capitalism was always, in Clara Zetkin’s words, a “wager.” (789) Under the pressure of revolutionary events, the Comintern faced a tangle of challenges. The Bolsheviks were the only party in the Comintern that had carried out a successful revolution. As a result, it enjoyed enormous prestige and naturally took a leading role in the development of the Comintern. Meanwhile, many of the new revolutionary parties, most notably the German, were built rapidly out of the wreckage of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) betrayals and lacked cohesion. It was a project beset by difficulties from its outset and was ultimately unsuccessful. Read more…
One hundred years ago, on June 28, 1916, 55,000 metalworkers in Berlin went on strike to protest the sentencing of Karl Liebknecht to 2½ years in prison. It was Germany’s first mass protest strike of World War 1. Liebknecht received mass support in Germany and beyond as the first German socialist to have voted against parliamentary allocations to pay for the government war spending.
He had been arrested at an illegal May Day demonstration organized by the Spartacist League, just after calling out, “Down with the war! Down with the government!” Two days after his arrest, Liebknecht explained the goals of the May Day demonstration and the Spartacist League in the following statement at his trial. Read more…
The first two public consultations on climate action organized by Canada’s national government in Toronto gave strong support to the demands of the People’s Climate Plan (PCP), an alternative to federal climate-related proposals. The PCP’s proposals are listed below.
Hundreds of people packed the room at a climate consultation in Toronto on June 17, 2016. Source: 350.org.
The two concepts most frequently voiced at the gatherings, held June 17 and June 24, were support for Indigenous rights and opposition to further expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. Participants listened attentively to the government’s presentations but offered no congratulations for its initial proposals.
At a related Toronto consultation on June 15 on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, also held by the federal government, was met by sharp and near-unanimous opposition from an audience of several hundred. If ratified, the deal would place further legal barriers in the path of meaningful climate action.
The People’s Climate Plan is a tool to promote public engagement with these government initiatives and formulation of an alternative. Judging by the first two Toronto consultations, it provides a useful starting point. Read more…
By Ian Angus – Every two years, the leaders of the world’s richest countries assemble for UN Climate negotiations, and deliberately sabotage any effort to slow climate change. After one of those betrayals, in Copenhagen in 2009, activists from hundreds of African organizations eloquently expressed their outrage in the African Climate Justice Manifesto:
Africa stands on the frontline of climate change. Across our continent, in villages, in towns, on coastlines and deep in the heart of Africa, people battle daily with a growing climate crisis. Our rivers run dry. Our crops turn to dust. Seasons shift and change. The effects of climate change are reflected in the expectant eyes of hungry children, and in the lengthening footsteps of women carrying water. Read more…
by John Riddell. The People’s Climate Plan Teach-in, held in Toronto June 4, took great strides forward in presenting a forceful alternative to the inadequate and deceptive National Climate Strategy proposals of Canada’s federal government.
In the opening session, five leading climate activists presented a coherent, unified climate justice strategy, proposing effective action to save the world from climate disaster interlocked with practical measures to assist working people and the poor who are the first victims of global warming. Displayed in the meeting, held in the University of Toronto, were the banners: “Pipelines = Climate Change”; “Stop Line 9”; and (in French) “Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground.”
After lunch, the more than 100 participants split up into training groups of half a dozen to develop skills for effective intervention in the “public consultation” meetings the Trudeau government proposes to hold over the coming three months. Read more…
I find myself agreeing with his broadest generalizations; namely, that
“Experience over the past decades would seem to demonstrate that while non-Marxist broad parties cannot effectively transcend capitalism, projects of building Marxist parties will likely flounder if they are divorced from wider efforts to promote a mass political representation of and for the working-class majority.”
This is a useful starting point even if “seem to demonstrate” and “will likely flounder” leave a lot of wiggle room.
By John Riddell. Karl Kautsky’s 1909 article “Sects or class parties,” posted here on Eric Blanc’s suggestion, awakened my memories of what I heard and learned when I encountered the Marxist movement in Canada in the late 1950s. I do not recall any mention of Kautsky’s article then, but Kautsky’s line of argument was part of the teachings of Marxism in Canada, as I received them.
Katusky’s entire exposition of how the workers’ movement evolved in a different way in “Anglo-Saxon countries,” as opposed to Continental Europe, figured in the oral tradition recounted to me then. Read more…
I’m glad that Eric Blanc was inspired to make Kautsky’s article “Party, class, and Marxism: Did Kautsky advocate ‘Leninism’” better known. Eric’s introductory comments are certainly cogent – I especially liked the bit at the end about not condescending to these people. My comments below are some rather random musings on the issues brought up by the article, especially when put in the longer historical context that Eric brings out.
Is Kautsky’s article something innovative, something unexpected, or is it just an entirely predictable application of Kautsky’s basic view of the party expressed in earlier, more foundational writings? My answer is definitely: a predictable application. Read more…
I have been active in the revolutionary socialist movement in Canada, the United States and Europe since the 1960s. This blog features my current articles and some of my past writings that still seem relevant.
I welcome constructive criticism and discussion; please read the Comments Policy before posting. --John Riddell
In the Autumn 2016 issue of 
By John Riddell. Umair Muhammad’s post on my blog, “
n, five leading climate activists presented a coherent, unified climate justice strategy, proposing effective action to save the world from climate disaster interlocked with practical measures to assist working people and the poor who are the first victims of global warming. Displayed in the meeting, held in the University of Toronto, were the banners: “Pipelines = Climate Change”; “Stop Line 9”; and (in French) “Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground.”