International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Ernie Tate's memoirs from the fifties and sixties

Ian Birchall — 2014-08-06T09:53:19Z

The following review, by Ian Birchall, a prominent Marxist scholar and former long time leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain will appear in the next issue of Revolutionary History [1] which will be devoted to writings of Clara Zetkin, previously unavailable in English.

- Reviews section / Britain, Fourth International, Reviews, Historical events and figures

The spirit of those frenzied days

Ian Birchall — 2013-12-13T10:12:03Z

A few years ago I was in an arts center in Southern Paris. While waiting for the play I had gone to see, I bought a volume of Siné's political cartoons from a second-hand bookstall. I asked the stall-holder, a man a little younger than myself, if he had taken part in 1968. He looked almost surprised as he replied: “I was at the Sorbonne. I was twenty. I'd have been an imbecile not to take part.”

- Reviews section / France, Reviews, Historical events and figures

Fraternising With the Enemy

Ian Birchall — 2013-11-03T21:54:16Z

The Second World War remains a matter of controversy. Two recent books - Donny Gluckstein's A People's History of the Second World War (Pluto, 2012) and James Heartfield's An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (Zero, 2012) - have argued powerfully that the war was a struggle between empires rather than a crusade against fascism. But what these books failed to give was any account of those who held such a position at the time, and how they put their theory into practice.

- Reviews section / France, Reviews, Historical events and figures