Although the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968 provides the opportunity for new celebrations, new tributes and testimonies, for extensions of previous historiographical research, few writings take seriously the political questions raised by this event. However, ten years after the beautiful month of May, in 1978, the event was still live, and even though social setbacks were being announced and the crisis was beginning to install itself, it was still politics and not history that people were discussing with regard to May 1968. Hence the interest in plunging back into the debates of that time, with this article by Daniel Bensaïd, published in 1978 in a review of the Revolutionary Communist League, Les Cahiers de la taupe (No. 23, dated May-June 1978).[Contretemps]
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Features
Latest update : 20 October.
This section contains articles on theoretical, analytical and historical themes usually longer than articles published in the news magazine section.
Articles in this section
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May 1968
1968 – It was just the beginning
7 June 2018, by Daniel Bensaïd -
Our history
Just Short of the "Conscious Leap": Ernest Mandel in 1968
26 May 2018, by Jan Willem StutjeJan Willem Stutje’s Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred, published by Verso in a translation by Christopher Beck and Peter Drucker in 2009, is the first biography of the great Belgian intellectual and militant of the Fourth International.
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Indonesia
1968: A Crushing Defeat for the Indonesian Left
25 May 2018, by Vannessa HearmanIn 1968, Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime obliterated the Indonesian Communist Party’s efforts to rebuild after the 1965 massacre.
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May 1968
1968: a “global moment”, the political commitment of a militant generation
23 May 2018, by Pierre RoussetHow can we make the decade 1965-1975 come alive again, how can we highlight what was at stake in the world and in France, its scope, our commitment, our activist universe? Through analysis certainly, but reinforced by lived experience, which is necessarily more personal. This is a delicate exercise, with a constant coming and going between general considerations, the transmission of a political history that is sometimes specific (that of my political current) and its individual, daily implications. To this end, I am mobilizing my own memories - and I am wary of memory and especially of mine, which I know is incomplete. I am therefore appealling for a confrontation of recollections (or archives) that could lead me to correct or qualify some of my remarks.
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France
The event itself and its effects... Looking back on May ‘68
2 May 2018, by Daniel BensaïdIn 2008, in an interview with Francis Sitel for the journal Critique communiste (No. 188) Daniel Bensaïd looked back over the strategic debates which took place in May 1968, and especially in its immediate aftermath, among the militants of what became in 1969 the Communist League. Between enthusiasm for the rise of struggles and fear of being swept away by the ebb tide of the mobilizations, between predictions about the coming revolution and reformist dead ends, it was the question of organization, of the political party, that was posed at that time in new terms for a far left that was overwhelmingly composed of students. Contretemps
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Russia
The Eternal Hunt for the Red Man
2 May 2018, by Ilya BudraitskisThe dramatic events in Russia and Ukraine over the past two years have begun a new phase in the struggle over the legacy of communism in the post-Soviet space. As the concrete features of “real socialism” become blurred and vanish, those necessary for the production of ideology become ever more sharply defined. It’s often argued that communism, buried a quarter of a century ago as living practice, has since acquired an afterlife in the form of a restless corpse, a remnant, a regurgitated survivor from the past, blighting the lives of new generations.
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Global Migration
27 April 2018, by SAP (Denmark)From the middle of the 20th century, migration has been a decisive political issue. International organizations estimate that the number of people moving within and across national borders has grown to greater extent than ever since World War II. These type of estimates are never neutral – how far, and under which circumstances, do you have to move to be counted as a migrant, for instance? It is the same with statistics; you always have to make some qualification.
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Women
The year of #MeToo
26 April 2018, by Elizabeth SchulteMany things can spark a wildfire, but it’s what happens afterward that determines whether that fire will rage. In the case of the #MeToo campaign, the dozens of women who stepped forward to talk about their experiences of having been sexually assaulted by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was the catalyst for tens of thousands more women to break the silence about their own stories of sexual assault and harassment—providing fuel to a fire that has been long in the making.
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Yanis Varoufakis’s Account of the Greek Crisis: a Self-Incrimination Pt 1
25 April 2018, by Éric ToussaintProposals Doomed to Fail
In his latest book, Adults in the Room [1] Yanis Varoufakis gives us his version of the events that led to the Tsipras government’s shameful capitulation in July 2015. It essentially analyses the period 2009-2015, though it makes incursions into earlier periods. [2]
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Debt
Yanis Varoufakis’s Account of the Greek Crisis: a Self-Incrimination Pt 2
25 April 2018, by Éric ToussaintThe Varoufakis-Tsipras Line was Doomed to Fail from the Word ‘Go’
Disclaimer: This series of articles on Varoufakis’s book, Adults in The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment is a guide for left-leaning readers who are not happy with the dominant narrative meted out by the mainstream media and the Troika-controlled governments. This is also a guide for readers who are dissatisfied with the former Finance Minister’s version. As a counterpoint to Varoufakis’s story, I have highlighted events that he is silent about and I have expressed different views on what he should have done and what he did instead. My story runs parallel, and not opposite, to his.
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- Friedrich Engels and Primitive Communism
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- Ecological Imperialism and Jair Bolsonaro’s Agenda in Brazil
- Ernest Mandel’s ‘Introduction to Marxist Theory’
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- Feminism: women fighting for their rights have always met resistance from male power …
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- Women, race and class in social movements: An extract
- Farewell Comrade Lal Khan
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- Maria José Belo Meca Maranhão
- Change Everything: Foundations and Challenges of the Feminist Strike in Spain
- Nicaragua: The other revolution betrayed
- The Political Economy of Hungary’s New “Slave Law”
- Helena Lopes da Silva (1949-2018)
- Adam Smith and the Yellow Vest Movement.
- A last farewell to Mick Woods
- Fifty years after the revolutions of ‘68
- The spirit of 1968 is inextinguishable – even 50 years later
- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia: 1968 as the antipodes of 1989
- The Russian Revolution, Black Bolshevichki and Social Reproduction
- The strategic role of the soviets in the class struggle
- On the contribution of the outstanding Hungarian Marxist philosopher István Mészáros (1930-2017) to critical thinking
- After Alienation
- Identity Politics Can Only Get Us So Far
- Queer sexuality, labour and nation
- From the concept of the people to the materialization of a leader?
- Being Brave Because It Is Right
- Voting on Dictatorship
- Lenin and Trotsky confronting the bureaucracy
- World economy: The return of crisis
- Xi Jinping’s China – An extremely complex transition whose outcome remains unpredictable
- Part 3: Argentina - Further Action against Illegitimate Debt
- “The Hammer Blow of the Revolution”
- Remembering the riots of spring 1976 in China
- Newly Independent Greece had an Odious Debt round her Neck
- Origins, dynamics and developments of the revolutionary process
- “Daniel Bensaïd fought to the end against a system that knows no bounds in brutality”
- New capitalist domination and imperialism in Africa
- Capitalism and Gender Oppression
- The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State
- Closing the Conceptual Gap
- The biodiversity crisis and the environmentalist left
- Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism
- The state of reproductive rights in 2015
- The social movement for independence and the crisis of the British state
- The European Central Bank’s true priorities
- The big private banks run on LTRO
- South Korea : the miracle unmasked
- “Leaps Leaps Leaps”: Lenin and politics
- LGBT Activism in Mainland China
- The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin
- Remarks on Gender
- The World Bank and the IMF in Indonesia: an emblematic interference
- The World Bank and the Philippines
- Early Soviet Commitment to Environment Protection and its Decline
- United States : the Fed Bails Out Wall Street
- World Bank and IMF support to dictatorships
- Domination of the United States on the World Bank
- Private banks shamefully enjoy a monopoly of lending to the public sector
- Governments make Gifts Galore to Private Banks
- Central Banks lend massively to the banking sector
- The Impunity Enjoyed by the Banks must Stop
- Complicity of Dexia in very serious Human Rights violations in the Israeli occupied territories
- The Big Banks Organise Massive Tax Evasion on an International Scale
- Big banks’ tampering with interest rates
- Drug and Bank Lords
- Banks and the New “Too Big to Jail” Doctrine
- The cancellation of German debt in 1953 versus the attitude to the Third World and Greece
- Why the Marshall Plan ?
- SUNFED versus World Bank
- Early conflicts between the UN and the World Bank/IMF tandem
- The World Bank assists the powerful witch-hunters
- Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions
- Women and the Early Years of Japanese Communism
- Freedom Summer, 1964: An Overview
- The personal and the political
- James Hansen’s ’exit strategy’ from global warming
- A Fossil Fuel Exit Program
- The roots and grassroots of the Syrian revolution
- Precarity as contraceptive: conversations on the situation of abortion in Spain
- 100th Anniversary of The Woman’s Dreadnought
- Clara Zetkin in the lion’s den – Workers’ unity and feminism at the 1921 Comintern congress
- The Liberation of Women
- "We Shall Overcome": Honoring Pete Seeger
- Luxemburg and Trotsky on Russian Revolution
- An Interview with Alan Sears
- Socialist Feminism – Hidden from Herstory
- The Fourth International and women’s liberation
- The feminist challenge to traditional political organisations
- The forgotten history of the “class struggle feminist” current
- The implications of gender equality at work on female workers from 1968 to the 1980s in France
- The transitional program and the tools to overthrow capitalism
- General Vo Nguyen Giap (1911-2013): Military hero, revolutionary intellectual, environmentalist
- Norman Geras: “An adult life divided into two distinct chapters”
- Idalberto Ferrera Acosta (1918-2013), Cuban Trotskyist
- In women’s liberation the first step is self-consciousness
- For an anticapitalist feminism in the here and now
- Dangerous Liaisons: The marriages and divorces of Marxism and Feminism
- Feminism to the tune of the cumbia, corrida, tango, cueca, samba . . .
- Women and work in Western Europe
- Jean-Michel Krivine (1932-2013): a militant surgeon and an internationalist
- A Marxist Critique of Post-Marxism
- Why socialists need feminism
- The Current Mobilizations over Rape
- A Plea for an Ecological Reconstruction of Marxism
- Struggle for Self-Determination of the Bangsamoro Revolutionary Fronts: A Historical Perspective and Current Realities
- For another difference
- On the question of sexual difference
- Postmodernism and Feminism
- The significance of Occupy
- Francis Fukuyama and the ‘absent left’
- A personal tribute to Dave Packer
- Dave Packer: a tribute
- Gerry Foley: A Life Dedicated to Socialist Revolution
- The Left against Debt-tatorship
- In the eye of the storm: the debt crisis in the European Union
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- The crisis of French Marxism
- Strategy and Party
- The spark ignites in the action - the philosophy of praxis in the thought of Rosa Luxemburg
- Marxisms, theory, yesterday and today
- Marxism and Feminism
- The powers of communism
- Seventy years since the formation of the Fourth International
- Has working-class consciousness collapsed?
- Elements of revolutionary strategy
- The Challenge of Revolutionary Democracy in the Life and Thought of Rosa Luxemburg
- Uneven and Combined Development and the Sweep of History: Focus on Europe
- Dialectics and Revolution
- The Marxism of Trotsky’s "Results and Prospects"
- The Mole and the Locomotive
- Marx, Weber and the Critique of Capitalism
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- Lessons from a Critical Intellectual
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Footnotes
[1] See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/15/adults-in-room-battle-europes-deep-establishment-yanis-varoufakis-review
[2] This version contains parts 1-4 of Toussaint’s article which was originally published in 7 parts. Parts 5-7 are here Yanis Varoufakis’s Account of the Greek Crisis: a Self-Incrimination Pt 2
Anticapitalistas on the calling of the elections: let’s continue the struggle on the streets
Pedro Sánchez has announced that he is bringing forward the date of the elections, which will now take place on 29 November. This call for elections comes against a backdrop of major protests over the housing crisis, which have sparked a significant resurgence of mobilisation amongst the left and the working class in the face of a structural problem that is becoming increasingly urgent.
- read article...Sinistra Anticapitalista Summer University: Solidarity, Partners, Ecosocialists
“AI, Anti-Capitalist Intelligence”, the third edition of Italy’s Ecosocialist Summer University – organized by Sinistra Anticapitalista and the Livio Maitan Library – ended on Sunday 6 September 2026 with a well-attended debate on the alternative to capitalist barbarism, moderated by Armando Morgia, in which Antonella Bundu (Toscana Rossa), Dario Salvetti (formerly of GKN), Eliana Como (CGIL oppositionist), Luca Scacchi (AMR Controvento), Giulio Calella (Edizioni Alegre) and Francesco Locantore (Gauche anticapitaliste) participated, among others.
- read article...Slovenian trade unions propose referendum to overturn the new government’s anti-social policies
The parliamentary elections held in early 2026 in Slovenia resulted in a narrow majority for the right, thereby enabling the formation of a radical conservative government. This government wasted no time in taking steps to undermine the welfare state.
- read article...Statement on the Pakistani State’s Attack on Free Media “Jeddojehad”
The Pakistani military establishment had launched an attack on the online Jeddojehad. Its editor, Farooq Suhleria’s, home was raided. He could not be arrested as he was not in the country. But it means he cannot return to his job. Another member of the Editorial Board was also raided. The website has been shut down.
- read article...Open Letter from Sergio Ramirez to President Lula da Silva
“Ortega has abolished elections. Do not deny Nicaragua the right to choose freely—the same right that could make you president of Brazil for a fourth time.”
- read article...
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