On John Marot’s request, I have also added a short comment he made on this listserv. — John Riddell Read more…
By Suzanne Weiss. Based on a talk given to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, June 28, 2013.
Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has a dream. If he has his way Canada will be the new world oil superpower – a rival to Saudi Arabia. It’s a wonderful dream for Harper and Canada’s profiteers, but the reality for the rest of humankind is grim. Here in Toronto we are gaining experience in resisting this project. Read more…
By John Riddell. Paul Levi’s career as a leader of the German Communist party was brilliant but brief. Before the party was founded, at the end of 1918, he was a close associate of both Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. When Luxemburg was killed in 1919, he became the German Communist Party’s foremost leader. He headed the process through which it became a mass party at the end of 1920. Yet only four months later he was expelled from the party.
What explains his sudden downfall? I will address just one aspect of this story: the influence of shifts in the ranks of the German working class. Read more…
The following article on the dangers of extracting oil or gas through fracking was published in April 2013 by the National Farmers Union, a Canadian affiliate of La Via Campesina. – JR
There are shale gas or coal bed methane formations in northern BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which lie mostly beneath farmland. It should be no surprise, therefore, that at the 2012 National Convention, the National Farmers Union (NFU) resolved to call on governments to implement a series of recommended regulations regarding hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In March 2013, the NFU submitted a response to Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board’s (ERCB) request for public input about its proposed new regulatory framework to deal with unconventional oil and gas development. Read more…
The most contentious debate at the Historical Materialism New York 2013 conference last month took place over a topic that might seem familiar and well digested: “How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?” Neil Davidson, author of the recent book by that name, squared off with Jeff Goodwin and Charlie Post (audio file here). Read more…
Por John Riddell. Este articulo primero fue publicado en la revista venezolana América XXI. Click here for English text.
Hugo Chávez no fue sólo un gran patriota bolivariano; él fue un defensor de los desposeídos del mundo. Read more…
By John Riddell. The following tribute was published in Spanish on April 15, 2013, in the Venezuelan publication América XXI. Click here for Spanish text.
Hugo Chávez was not only a great Bolivarian patriot; he was a tribune of the world’s dispossessed.
- At an anti-imperialist conference in Cairo in 2007, I heard Chávez hailed for his solidarity with Palestinians as “a better Arab than the Arabs”; “closer to us than the Arabs that impose injustice.” Read more…
By John Riddell. The Ecosocialist Conference, a broad and enthusiastic all-day meeting in New York April 20, took a big step toward creating an anti-capitalist wing of the environmental movement.
The conference was arranged in just six weeks by organizers of the Ecosocialist Contingent in the mass demonstration against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in Washington February 17. It was supported by 29 groups who subscribed to the Ecosocialist Contingent statement for “system change, not climate change.” Read more…
Lars Lih is widely known as one of the most influential and innovative contemporary historians of Marxism. He has provided the following listing of his online articles on Lenin, Karl Kautsky, and Bolshevism. For each article, I have added a quotation indicating its topic. I’ve also added a stimulating recent interview. See also “More ‘Lars Lih Online’: six further studies of Bolshevism.” — John Riddell Read more…
By Lars T. Lih. Lars Lih is a Montreal-based educator and historian of Marxism. Vladimir Nevsky (1876-1937) lived the life (in the words of an autobiographical sketch written in the 1920s) of an “ordinary party worker”, a professional, in the Bolshevik underground. Joining the party in 1897, he was a mid-level Bolshevik praktik who played a visible role in 1917 conducting party work in the army. Like so many others in his generation, he was arrested in the mid-thirties and executed in 1937. Read more…
By John Riddell. “Our campaign against Line 9 is an essential element of the global effort to save the climate,” Ian Angus told 150 participants in the “No Tar Sands in Toronto!” meeting held April 7 in the city’s East End.
Line 9 is a 37-year-old pipeline that oil industry giant Enbridge Corp. wants to modify to carry tar sands oil across Toronto. If this is done, Toronto could face toxic spills like the one on March 29 that devastated a subdivision in Mayflower, Arkansas. Read more…
Omnibus Bills, Idle No More, and the NFU:
OUR COMMON LAND, OUR COMMON GROUND
This statement in support of the Indigenous protest movement Idle No More is published in the Spring 2013 issue of Union Farmer Quarterly, the official publication of Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU), an affiliate of La Via Campesina.
With a January 15 media release, we made public our support for the Idle No More movement, saying:
“The NFU is proud to declare its solidarity with Idle No More, which is bringing people together from across Canada to stop the Harper government from riding roughshod over our collective rights. We want a better Canada.” Read more…
By John Riddell. I’ve spent time recently at literature tables on streets here in Toronto’s East End explaining the tar sands threat to neighbours for whom this topic is quite new. I meet every conceivable response, from tar sands enthusiasm to determined opposition.
Let me explain how this developed.
The challenge in engaging with climate change is to find ways to relate the overall global crisis to immediate, specific issues that visibly affect people’s quality of life and security. Read more…
By Ian Beeching. The following guest article first appeared in International Socialism (UK) with the subtitle, “On My Resignation from the International Socialists of Canada.”
The crisis in the British Socialist Workers Party raises an important issue of principle for socialists throughout the world. A serious accusation of rape was made by a teenage member of the SWP against a Central Committee leading member of the party in his 40s. How socialists respond to allegations of rape is not a tactical question nor is it the internal affair of a single organization. Internal organizational practices are reflections of principles. Although internal organizational mechanisms may vary, when mechanisms to address violations of principle fail, credibility and capacity to participate in movements against oppression are damaged. Read more…
For a translation into Korean, see “Another World.”
How did Communist parties handle issues of internal discipline and democracy in Lenin’s time? An intense discussion now under way within the British Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) raises issues related to the nature of internal democracy in the Communist International (Comintern) during 1919–23, the period of its first four congresses.[1] Read more…