By BARRY WEISLEDER “James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland,” by Priscilla Metscher. (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 2002), 243 pages. The aftermath of the 101st anniversary of the Easter Rising is a good time to become (re)acquainted with the views of the great Irish republican socialist, James Connolly. Though many of today’s Irish nationalists and “socialists” pay homage…
By DAVID JONES “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution,” by Kenneth D. Ackerman. (Berkeley, Calif., Counterpoint 2016), $30. One hundred years ago, on Jan. 13, 1917, the small Spanish passenger vessel SS (or Vapor Correo) Montserrat (Vapor is Spanish for steamship, Correo for mail) arrived in the harbor of…
By DAVID KIELY and CHRISTINE MARIE With the advent of the Trump administration and a conservative Congress, women and their allies marched in Washington and in hundreds of other cities on Jan. 21. The fact that the Washington march blossomed from a little seed into a huge national undertaking almost overnight is a sign that millions…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” by Leonardo Padura. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2014. Originally published in Spanish in 2009 as “El hombre que amaba a los perros.” Available in hardcover and paperback in both languages. With the publication of “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” Cuban writer Leonardo Padura joins the…
By CLIFFORD D. CONNER “Unsinkable Patriot: The Life and Times of Thomas Cave in Revolutionary America,” by Michael Schreiber, 2016. Available from Amazon, 737 pages, $25.95. Thomas who? If Thomas Cave’s name does not ring any bells, it does not indicate a deficit in your education. He was not an outstanding historical figure in any…
By CHRISTINE MARIE — NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — An ambitious Youth for Socialist Action educational conference drew close to 100 participants, including students from at least six different colleges, to Central Connecticut State University on Saturday, Oct. 22. The conference was opened by the past president of the CCSU YSA, David Kiely, who said that…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE Sept. 11, 2016, marks the 43rd anniversary of the violent 1973 coup in Chile against the elected left popular front government of Salvador Allende. Like the ancient Roman god Janus, imperialism has two faces. One face is political, the other economic. We must, if we wish to change the world, understand both…
The Seventeenth National Convention of Socialist Action was held Aug. 19-21 in Kansas City, Mo. The convention was preceded by the party’s traditional three-month pre-convention discussion period, which included some 50 written contributions from SA members. Delegates from across the country presented reports of their work in many movements—including struggles against global warming and for climate justice,…
By MARK UGOLINI John Riddell and Mike Taber, “To the Masses” (Haymarket Books 2016), 1299 pp., $55 Thanks to John Riddell and Mike Taber for the huge effort over many years that has brought us “To the Masses” and the other wonderful books that make up their series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time.…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER The autumn of 1805 was unusually mild. Farmers were able to plough their land almost until Christmas. And in Philadelphia, the balmy temperatures might have “gone to the head” of a group of journeymen cordwainers [shoemakers], who had the temerity on Nov. 1, 1805, to undertake what was one of the earliest…
By NICK BAKER We are seeing a renewed interest in socialism today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a “democratic socialist” to mask his 98-percent Democratic Party-line voting record, has given much publicity to the word “socialist,” and many young Sanders supporters call themselves socialists. The Sanders candidacy is no accident. His…
On the fortieth anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Rebellion in South Africa, we reprint two articles from International Viewpoint, the English-language on-line journal of the Fourth International. The author of the first article, Noor Nieftagodien, is the head of the History Workshop at Wits University. The second author, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, is currently a PHD student…
By BARRY WEISLEDER Is it time to build an international revolutionary workers’ party? James P. Cannon consistently said yes. Isaac Deutscher, for most of his adult life, said no. Both were highly esteemed Marxists, selflessly dedicated to workers’ self-emancipation. But their difference on this crucial point amplified important political divergences. Some 45 years after their…
By BRUCE LESNICK I wholeheartedly support the populist programs that Bernie Sanders advocates—from single-payer health care, to free college tuition, to taxing the rich and more. But borrowing from Malcolm X [see excerpt below], Bernie is a house socialist and I’m a field socialist. Bernie doesn’t want to replace or overthrow capitalism. Like all house socialists, he thinks capitalism can be fixed or tamed…
By GEORGE BRYAN — SPECIAL FEATURE: Seven presentations from the debates — Two Socialist Action-sponsored public forums entitled “Debating the 2016 Presidential Election and the Key Issues of our Time” attracted a total of 250 Bay Area political activists in Oakland and San Francisco over the weekend of Feb. 5-6. Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic…
By BRUCE LESNICK It [is] too much the way of [mainstream politicians] to talk of this terrible [crisis] as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the…
By BARRY WEISLEDER The 50th anniversary of one of the biggest political massacres of the 20th century passed in the West almost without notice. In 1965, a military coup in Indonesia, backed by the United States, unleashed a slaughter that consumed over one million lives. The aim of the insurgent generals was annihilation of the…
By JOE AUCIELLO Bernard Wolfe, “The Great Prince Died: A Novel About the Assassination of Trotsky,” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959/2015), 416 pp., $18. Credit the critical and popular success of two recent novels, “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver and “The Man Who Loved Dogs” by Leonardo Padura, for this year’s re-publication of this…
By JEFF MACKLER Paul LeBlanc, “Leon Trotsky,” Reaktion Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2015, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback Paul LeBlanc’s new and admirable brief biography of Leon Trotsky comes on the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacan, Mexico, at the hands of Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin, was…
By BILL ONASCH Joe Johnson passed away Aug. 5 in Chippewa Falls, Wis., at age 84. His long life was marked by resolute opposition to war, local and national leadership in the Socialist Workers Party, government persecution, an exceedingly frugal life style, and from middle age, devoted care to his mother during her final years.…
By MARK T. HARRIS In the annals of American socialism, the name of Eugene V. Debs stands out as the most prominent personality in the movement’s history. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-described independent socialist now campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, considers Debs one of his heroes. It’s almost certain Debs would not have…
By ANN MONTAGUE Kshama Sawant’s re-election campaign is in full swing. The Seattle Socialist Alternative candidate, who won a seat on the Seattle City Council two years ago, is mobilizing her supporters to win again. Since her election in 2013, Sawant fulfilled her campaign promise to make Seattle the first major city to pass a…
By ILYA BUDRAITSKIS Speaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Front a couple days ago [in November 2014], Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate aim.” Eduard Bernstein’s proposition,* misquoted and attributed for some reason to Leon Trotsky, is probably the…
By JOE AUCIELLO Review: Paul LeBlanc, “Unfinished Leninism,” (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 237 pp., $18. Icons, even revolutionary ones, have a sensible purpose, though the intent is not always realized. The iconic image summons the observer in the present to heed the achievements of the past and thus shape the future. An icon, then, is…
By JOE AUCIELLO Malcolm X, born May 19, 1925, would have been 90 years old this year had he not been assassinated 50 years ago (on Feb. 21, 1965). Now, decades later, safely buried, Malcolm X has become respectable. This transformation has been some years in the making, but there can be little doubt of…
