ISBN-13: 9780156034029

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher: Mariner Books

Year: 2008

Pages: None

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:41 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9788179551622

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher: Subarnarekha

Year: 1980

Pages: 486

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:40 p.m.

Four years after the Arab revolutions of 2011 the hopes that the uprisings kindled seem to have been all but extinguished. Libya, Syria and Iraq present grim variations on the theme of “failed states”.1 Meanwhile, a United States-led military coalition of Western powers and their Arab allies is back in action in northern Iraq and Syria, justifying their intervention with the same “humanitarian” rhetoric that provided cover for the catastrophic occupation of Iraq after 2003. In Egypt the dictatorship has resurrected itself in a more violent and bloody form than even the worst days of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, killing over 1,000 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in a single day on 14 August 2013, jailing over 40,000 political prisoners during the following year and creating a new cult of personality around Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. The iron grip of repression on Bahrain has not eased since the crushing of the uprising there in 2011. Looming over all this, at least in the vision of the region that emerges from the Western media, is the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now also known simply as the Islamic State (IS) or by its Arabic acronym, Da’ash. This violent, sectarian jihadi group seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014, routing the Iraqi army. It has captivated the Western media with well-publicised atrocities including the beheading of captured British and US citizens and systematic brutality against women, religious minorities and Muslims from other backgrounds to their own. As they have advanced across western and northern Iraq, ISIS fighters have carried out massacres and ethnic cleansing, including mass killings of members of the Yazidi religion, Shia prisoners in Iraqi jails and men from the Albu Nimr tribe, to mention only a handful of examples.

ISBN-13: 9781909026841

ISBN-10: 1909026840

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2015

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:39 p.m.

On 4 August 1914 social democratic deputies in both the German Reichstag and the French Chamber of Deputies voted unanimously for war credits.1 Among those who voted on that day were deputies who had, less than a week earlier, met together under the auspices of the Socialist (Second) International to champion peace. The initial anti-war posturing of these representatives reflected the International’s declared policy as articulated at its Stuttgart conference in 1907 and reiterated at its Basel conference of 1912. This policy included not only the demand that socialists should “exert every effort to prevent” war, but also the requirement that they should “utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”.2 Despite these unanimously agreed guidelines the French and German deputies were not alone in voting to support their governments’ war efforts in the first week of August. Two days earlier Belgian socialists voted to align themselves with their state in an act that was repeated shortly afterwards by the Labour Party representatives in the British parliament, albeit after the removal of Ramsay MacDonald, the party’s anti-war leader. Meanwhile Austrian and Hungarian socialists who had been denied the opportunity of a vote made up for this by publishing an outpouring of bellicose literature in their press.3 It is not that there was no opposition to this rush to patriotism. In fact, 14 of the 92 German socialist deputies who met in a closed session on 3 August opposed the vote for war credits. However, norms of party discipline meant that these opinions were not expressed on the floor of the Reichstag—and ironically it was one of the 14 anti-war deputies, Hugo Haase, who read out the party’s pro-war statement to the Reichstag. Unfortunately, this suppression of anti-war voices was typical within the International. Discounting the tiny Bulgarian and Serbian organisations, among socialists in the belligerent states the only group with a mass base to stand out against the war was the Russian party.

ISBN-13: None

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2014

Pages: None

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:35 p.m.

The French events of May 1968 were a profound shock to General de Gaulle’s ten-year presidency and the French state. A student rebellion at the prestigious University of Paris sparked a general strike of roughly ten million workers. Twenty years after the event former Paris police chief Maurice Grimaud was asked in an interview, “Could the state have collapsed?” He replied in a very revealing manner: The real danger was when the workers took part. First of all, on 13 May, a great united demonstration of solidarity after the night of the barricades, then the following days when, spontaneously, the youngest workers, without consulting the unions, decided to follow the students. At last from 16 and 17 May, when the large forces of the CGT and CFDT [union federations], understanding that their credibility was at stake, call for the generalization of the strike. It is then that the fragility of the state appeared clearly. The police could disperse a demonstration, overturn ten or 20 barricades, it could not clear out 100 or 500 factories, workshops, department stores, banks and train stations. And less still get them back to work.

ISBN-13: 9781905192366

ISBN-10: 1905192363

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2008

Pages: 130

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:33 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9781909026407

ISBN-10: 1909026409

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2013

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:32 p.m.

What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all but dead and traditional reformist parties offering little beyond doing austerity in a fairer manner, revolution from below would seem to be an idea whose time has at long last returned. Yet the working class seems “slow” to fulfil the role allotted it by classical Marxism. It has, perhaps, even “accepted” neoliberalism. Many activists do not believe that class or political parties define anti-systemic movements. The idea of working class revolution led by a revolutionary party to smash the state seems the quaint property of irrelevant groups unable to break out of the far-left ghetto. This mood has affected the revolutionary left. For some the problem is the kind of party they used to believe in. Perhaps it is wrong to insist on a rigid distinction between “revolutionary” and “reformist”. Perhaps “mixing” the two can reconstruct a radical left able to fill the gap between a declining parliamentary reformism and a “Leninist” left that cannot grow. This seems to be what lies behind moves to create broad left parties that have the kind of appeal that, for example, Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France enjoy. A rapprochement with and re-evaluation of what the revolutionary left termed “left reformism” is therefore required.

ISBN-13: 9781909026780

ISBN-10: 1909026786

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2014

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:31 p.m.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. More than a million Afghans have died in 30 years of war, and almost everyone has lost someone close to them. Now George Bush, John McCain, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, and even Barack Obama, call for more troops to be sent, more planes and more death. In every country in Europe majorities in opinion polls are against participation in the Afghan war. Yet the media still present it as a good war. Iraq, they now admit, was a crime or wrong or maybe just a mistake. But Afghanistan is a war on terrorists, we are told; on fanatics, jihadis, sexists, savages; on people who are not “modern” and therefore deserve to die.

ISBN-13: None

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2008

Pages: None

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:30 p.m.

Fran Cetti’s article was written at the time of the European response to the Mediterranean tragedies during the summer and early autumn of 2015. These continue but have been overshadowed by many thousands of refugees, many from Syria, arriving in Europe via the western Balkans. Apart from Hungary, whose right-wing government has been struggling to keep to the (brutal) letter of the common European immigration and asylum rules, these appear to have for the moment been challenged by the determination and desperation of these forced migrants and by the extraordinary upswell in support among ordinary people across Europe. This pushed Angela Merkel initially to respond by overturning the Dublin Regulation. The German government said it expected to receive 800,000 (Syrian) asylum seekers this year. But then, ahead of the EU summit on 14 September to discuss binding quotas for refugees across Europe, Germany effectively suspended the Schengen agreement by closing its borders to more refugees. This underlines that, despite the extraordinary events of the late summer, the racist migration management agenda hasn’t gone away. The idea of “regional resettlement” of refugees close to where they have fled, and the epithet “economic migrant”, will no doubt be deployed more rigorously in an effort at future exclusion.

ISBN-13: 9781910885055

ISBN-10: 1910885053

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2015

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 19, 2025, 4:28 p.m.