Worker Opposition News Today

Paul Le Blanc — For those wanting to make use of Marxism to understand and change the world, among the most important classical thinkers are, surely, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

A vision of how a socialist, participatory economy could function.

Lars T Lih uses an eyewitness account to dispose of some old myths and to show how, if they were to rewin their majority, the Bolsheviks had to adjust to the shock of finding themselves in a minority

Alongside the Russian workers' attempts to create socialism -- not as some abstract far-off utopia in a political party program, but through confronting and changing the concrete reality of their everyday life -- were the activities of socialist parties, supposedly sympathetic to working class aspirations. This pamphlet tells the story of the Russian workers' struggle, in particular the efforts of the factory committees.

Paul Avrich's article from 1984 about G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers' Group

Matthew Quest, writing for Insurgent Notes, details CLR James' treatment of Lenin across decades of James' work. While CLR James broke with with Trotskyism and Trotsky as well as the Leninist party form, he never properly broke with Lenin or his works.

Originally printed in the Weekly Worker Sean Matgamna of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty addressed the CPGB's Communist University '98 on his understanding of the Soviet Union, and the possibilities for communists since its demise. The class struggle takes place on three fronts - economic, political, and ideological. I think that the ideological conditions everything else. Central to the class struggle on the level of ideas is the question of the Soviet Union.

There is a common narrative in the West, which corresponds to the Kremlin's narrative, that the Russian government may be tyrannical but it is supported by the majority of Russian people, and the dissident minority, while brave, has no ability to change society. This fits the Vladimir Putin regime's view of itself as the inheritor of a thousand-year-old state.

Alexandra Kollontai, born 150 years ago on March 31, 1872, was an outstanding figure in the Russian communist movement. In exile, she was internationally active as a speaker and author. In Germany, she became friendly with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Clara Zetkin.

The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists.