left communists
The Lessons of the “March Action”
The Lessons of the “March Action”-Gorter’s Last Letter to Lenin
Dear Comrade Lenin:
When we last parted in November of 1920, your last words on our quite divergent ideas concerning revolutionary tactics in Western Europe were to the effect that neither your opinions nor mine had been sufficiently tested: that experience would soon prove which of the two is correct.
We were in complete agreement on that.
Review: All Power to the Imagination
This review was submitted at the end of 1999 to Black Flag.
Appel, Jan, 1890-1985
A short autobiography of Jan Appel, aka Jan Arndt, a German libertarian communist and shipyard worker who most famously hijacked a steam ship to Russia after the German Revolution of 1918.
Appel's experiences during the 1918 Revolution drove him out of the Communist Party, and he subsequently helped found the more radical Communist Workers Party (KAPD).
The 'Left' Communists' Theses on the Current Situation (Russia, 1918)
Published by the academic journal Critique, Glasgow, in 1977, this text has long been unavailable in print and apparently never before freely available online. A very important text of the Russian Revolution, showing the divisions within the Bolshevik Party in their early days in power.
Such debates on strategy were soon to be suppressed in the name of 'party discipline'; not only in the Party, but within the larger society. Soon the only place where dissidents had the freedom to criticise and debate the nature of the new ruling regime would be in some Soviet prisons.
Lenin, Also - Ante Ciliga
Chapter 9 of Book 3 of Ante Ciliga's extraordinary book The Russian Enigma, originally published as In The Land of The Great Lie.
The book details Ciliga's time spent in Soviet Prisons and "isolaters" following his arrest for belonging to the Trotskyist Opposition, and provides a wealth of important documentary information concerning the miserable conditions in which the working class were reduced to living in, the extent of the 'criminalisation' of large swathes of the population,and the various forms in which resistance ap
What was the USSR? Part III
In the previous articles we examined various Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist positions on the nature of the USSR.
We now turn to the theories of the less well known but more interesting Communist Left, who were among the first revolutionary Marxists to distance themselves from the Russian model by deeming it state capitalist or simply capitalist.The Russian Left Communists' critique remained at the level of an immediate response to how capitalist measures were affecting the class, whereas in both the German/D
