Page 180 - Leon Trotsky News Today

Tarnished Gold At a time when Communism continues to maintain a patina of coolness despite the tens of millions murdered by its adherents and the billions who have lived under its tyrannies, Patrick Chura has written a sympathetic biography of American Communism’s foremost literary hatchet man. Michael Gold: The People’s Writer is a volume in the SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture. Chura, a professor of English at the University of Akron, offers a pro forma mea culp...

Konchalovsky; written by Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva Dear Comrades, the Russian entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, addresses one of the most significant and least understood episodes in the history of the Soviet Union: the massacre of dozens of workers in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Twenty-six people are believed to have been killed in the i...

Sylvia Ageloff and the assassination of Leon Trotsky on February 6.  On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán. Mercader’s access to the great revolutionary was made possible through his relationship with Sylvia Ageloff, a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In the aftermath of the assassination, Ageloff presented herself as an innocent victim of Mercader’s duplicity, a claim that was never challeng...

A live Q&A with David North and Eric London, streamed at wsws.org/live.

How Astronomer Anton Pannekoek Planned To Storm the Heavens 07/02/2021 Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek combined the roles of an important socialist thinker and a prominent scientist. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. There has always been a healthy crossover between Marxism and the natural sciences. Frederick Engels kept abreast of the latest scientific knowledge in his own time. In his work Dialectics of Nature, Engels warned that no matter how far humans were able to perfect their forms ...

February 6, 2021 —  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddells Marxist Essays and Commentary — The Communist International (or Comintern) was founded in Moscow in 1919, with the goal of helping to extend the socialist revolution that had taken place in Russia across Europe and around the world.   The Russian Communist (Bolshevik) party that had led in establishing Soviet power was respected in the International as a prime source of strategic and tacti...

Pentagon orders “stand-down” over fascist threat in US military The threat of a fascist military coup in America that erupted to the surface with the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 has not ended; it has only just begun. This is the only serious conclusion one can draw from the extraordinary order issued Thursday by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for a “stand-down” by the entire US military and its 2.1 million personnel to “discuss the problem of extremism in the ranks.” Sec...

WhatsApp AT FIRST GLANCE, a murder in Istanbul, an abduction in Dubai and a deportation from Austria may seem to be unrelated. But they are all part of a disturbing pattern of behaviour by authoritarian regimes, which are using violence, intimidation and technology to silence dissent abroad. A report published on February 4th by Freedom House, a think-tank, argues that “transnational repression” has become more common. It found that 31 states had physically attacked their citizens living in...

Facing 2021: Notes to the Nigerian Left  Facing 2021: Notes to the Nigerian Left  The last paragraph of my last published article for the year 2020, titled “Study notes on state and state failure” (December 22) started with a number of questions to the Nigerian Left. Please note that, our wishes notwithstanding, we do not see or present the Nigerian Left, as of today, as an undifferentiated entity. Rather, we realistically see it as a movement of various segments and fighting vanguards un...

“She was a narcissist who described herself beautifully.” The description of the mid 20th-century novelist Jean Rhys doesn’t apply to the author who wrote it, even if, in style and sentiment, it epitomises the publication in which it appeared – sly, aphoristic and unapologetically imperious. Mary-Kay Wilmers published her first piece for the London Review of Books in 1981, two years after joining the “paper” as an editor and 11 years before she became the editor-in-chief. (She is...