Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, was murdered seventy-five years ago today—on August 21, 1940—by Ramón Mercader, an agent of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky’s former comrade in the Communist Party and then the ruler of the Soviet Union. Stalin feared that Trotsky might organize a movement to overthrow the new ruling elite in the Soviet Union and that Trotsky’s followers might challenge the leading role of the parties of the Communist International active in working-class movements around (…)
The Institute Pantelis Pouliopoulos and the legacy of Greek Trotskyism
28 August 2015On August 6, Left Voice interviewed Kostas Skordoulis and Yanis Felekis, leading members of the group OKDE-Spartakos and founding members of the Institute for Political and Social Research Center Pantelis Pouliopoulos (IPSR Pouliopoulos).
John Percy, revolutionary party builder
19 August 2015, byJohn Percy, a central figure in the development of the Australian revolutionary socialist movement over the past half century, died on Wednesday 19 August in Sydney, after suffering a severe stroke on 20 July and another on 13 August.
Why is Turkey bombing the Kurds?
15 August 2015, byGiven interlocking domestic, regional, and international developments, the AKP has launched attacks on ISIS and the PKK, the latter evidently being the main target, with four main objectives.
Beyond Fear and Complacency: Critical Remarks on Taiwan’s Democracy and Its Aporia
14 August 2015, byBoth inside and outside Taiwan, the research on Taiwan’s democratization has been overwhelmingly dominated by Western liberal discourses. In the mainstream liberal view, to the extent that the “most powerful collective decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote” (Huntington, 1991: 7), Taiwan was no doubt democratic by 1996, a year marked by the first direct election for president (see e.g., Rigger, 1999).
Exploding with Rage, Imploding with Self-Doubt—but Exuding Socialist Potential
8 July 2015, byThe fast-reviving South African left is urgently coming to grips with the most acute national crises of structure and agency the country has experienced since the historic freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the shift of the entire body politic in favor of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). At that time, the ANC soon took control of the country’s progressive forces, winning mass social hegemony, vanquishing other liberation tendencies (Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness), and dissolving the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF) that civil society activists founded a decade earlier. It then negotiated the first democratic election, which it won handily in April 1994 under Nelson Mandela’s leadership. Afrikaner state managers and corporate titans, as well as multilateral agencies and other forces of imperialism, demanded from the ANC an elite transition that opened both the macro- and microeconomies. Property rights were granted maximum protection, even though whites had acquired the bulk of those through what is widely termed a crime against humanity: apartheid.
Inside the European Cataclysm
4 June 2015, byWriting on a century of violence since the Great War, as World War I was once called, could easily turn into a gallery of horrors or an awful, monotonous succession of wars and genocide, from the battle of Verdun to Baghdad, from the Armenian to the Rwanda genocide, passing through Auschwitz and the Gulag.
The biodiversity crisis and the environmentalist left
13 May 2015, byIn this presentation I want to advance four propositions that may be controversial:
• That biodiversity is the planet’s most valuable resource. It is also its most abused and threatened.
• That the biodiversity collapse we are witnessing today—the greatest mass extinction of species for 65 million years—is the most fundamental aspect of the whole environmental crisis.
• That most left environmentalists—including Marxist and socialist environmentalists—have failed to adequately recognise or address it.
• That this represents a serious failing in the overall approach of the left, including the Marxist left, to the environmental crisis.
Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism
3 May 2015, byThe concept of eco-socialism is based on a double paradoxical note: the solution to the “ecological crisis” due to the capitalist mode of production necessitates a response of a socialist type, whilst the environmental balance sheet of “actually existing socialism” is catastrophic. I will briefly develop these two elements and then present some foundations of an eco-socialist aggiornamento as it is conceived inside the “International Eco-socialist Network”. I hope to bring forward evidence that eco-socialism is something more than a new label on an old bottle: a necessary alternative adapted to the challenges of our times.
Intellectuals and the “The New Cold War”: from the Tragedy to the Farce of Choice
20 April 2015, byObservers speak of the “New Cold War” as a self-evident and incontrovertible reality. Already in the spring, the new contours of international politics, demarcated by sanctions and mutual rhetorical incursions, were fully recognized by the broadest segments of the public in Russia, Europe and the United States—including those who were very far from decision-making processes—as a return to the familiar and frightening principles of the second half of the twentieth century.
