Blogs

As 2018 opens economic optimism is breaking out amongst the capitalist class. Leaving aside the vainglorious boasts of the current President of the United States that unemployment in the US has reached lows only last seen in the post-war boom, or that the New York stock market is now at all time record highs, more serious economic commentators are arguing that after a decade of misery (at least for 99% of the planet) the signs of recovery from the 2007-8 banking collapse are now behind us. If this sounds familiar it is because we have heard the same tale so many times.

An enormous number of currencies already exist across the world (dollars, roubles, euros, yen, yuan, etc.) – most of them tightly held in the wallets of bourgeois minorities dazzled by the illusion of its self-valorisation – wherever the crisis of the production and sale of commodities rages.

On Thursday, 28th December 2017, in Mashhad the second most populous city in Iran, thousands of protesters gathered outside the city hall and chanted “Death to Rouhani”, the country’s President. Some reports have suggested that it may have been initiated by the conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, Rouhani's defeated rival in the May 2017 Presidential election. Later on, some others, including the senior officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, implicitly accused ex-President Ahmadinejad's circle being behind the recent protests. However it may have started, it quickly broke out of its intended framework and control and, in less than a week, spread to over 40 cities.

Some information on often overshadowed victims of Nazi aggression, and what their suffering tells us about the nature of totalitarianism.

Hand-wringing over the trashing of a few H&M branches in South Africa ignores the often highly militant struggles of the workers in H&M's supply chain (and others like it), themselves often women of colour and one of the most combative sections of the international working class.

We look at the recent history of migration to the UK and the current discussion about migration and wage decline, in particular within the nation state policies of Labour. We criticise the effort of trying to reconcile a largely liberal 'pro-migrant' position with Labour's national perspective and share our experiences of working and organising amongst migrant workers in west London.

This is the second in our series of translations from the review Kommunist via the French version published by the Collectif d’édition smolny (www.collectif-smolny.org) as La Revue Kommunist: Les communist de gauche contre le capitalisme d’état (The review Kommunist: Left Communists against state capitalism). Our first translation was of Radek’s article on the situation of the October Revolution in Russian in March 1918 entitled Five Months On. (See leftcom.org). This second one is also by Radek from Kommunist No. 1.

2017 will no doubt see a flood of publications to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution. There will be those who insist that the October Revolution provides a model for today and still others who will argue the opposite. Neither opinion is likely to go much beyond the defence of entrenched ideological positions. The fact that the great hopes raised by the October Revolution not only failed to materialise, but ended in a monstrous Stalinist regime which turned private exploitation into state exploitation, has been one of the greatest propaganda weapons for today’s capitalist system whose own crisis grows deeper with every year that passes.

In Revolutionary Perspectives 11 (due out January 2018) we shall be printing Bukharin’s short review of Lenin’s The State and Revolution. In the meantime we are publishing here another translation from the same journal Kommunist which appeared in March 1918. Kommunist was the journal of the “proletarian communists” or left communists who opposed the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as well as the change in direction which the revolution began to take at that time. We have already published several articles from it with our commentaries.

A look at browsing statistics and habits on libcom.org over 2017, as traffic increased and mobile browsing became significantly more important.

An introduction to a newish platform for producing anarchist texts in audio format.

This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the Communist Workers' Organisation has participated in a number of meetings to commemorate this. On 18 November the CWO held a meeting in Newcastle to discuss its legacy, the revolutionary events of 1917-1918 as well as the process of degeneration. The following document – The Russian Revolution: From Workers’ Inspiration to Proletarian Tragedy – served as the basis of the presentation and was followed by a discussion.

Translation of a commentary on last week’s election in Catalonia, from the Spanish blog Nuevo Curso.

Factory newsletter for Bakkavor workers. Bakkavor produces ready-meals for all major UK supermarkets. The company runs four factories and one warehouse in west London, employing in total around 3,000 workers.
PDF-version on: www.workerswildwest.wordpress.com

Mark Bray (Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook) and Shane Burley (Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It) talk about the growth of the far-right, the rise of Trump, and antifascism in the United states.

The rise of so-called populism and the far right over the past few years has been a global trend. We have written about it before – "reactionary ideologies always feed on social decomposition, atomisation and growing insecurity."

Trump has just offered two early Christmas presents to the imperialist project in Israel. This article briefly explains the wider context for this provocation.

An audio biography and discussion of the life of Louise Michel.

A piece discussing debates over the role of political ideas within social movements, and the debate within anarchism over political organization applied to the current context of North American anarchism.

The removal of Mugabe means only that the ruling elite will seek new imperialist links to solve the economic mess the country is in. Zimbabwe demonstrates for the nth time that "national liberation" in the epoch of imperialism means liberation only for the indigenous bourgeoisie linked to the world order of capitalism.