THE SOCIALIST WORKERS (SWP), now a curious sidebar in the history of radicalism, is a linear descendant of the political movement initiated in the United States by pro-Bolshevik followers of Leon Trotsky on the eve of the Great Depression.For 45 years, until the mid-1970s, the movement associated with the SWP was at the crossroads of the Far Left.
Reform and revolution today: The strategic puzzle
13 March 2011, by Jet MenistBetween 1945 and 1979, capitalism was overthrown in substantial parts of the planet. Alongside bureaucratic tyrannies, this yielded promising experiments like the Sandinista revolution, and a wealth of material for debates on socialist democracy and strategy. After 1979, with capital on the offensive, the strategic debates fell still. Only in the new century have we seen the beginning of what Daniel Bensaïd called ‘the return of the strategic question’. Flemish socialist Matthias Lievens’ new book on socialism and democracy in the 21st century provides a welcome opportunity to continue the discussion (which should not be restricted to those who can read it in Dutch).
Socialism and Democracy
13 March 2011, by Matthias LievensLet me first thank Jet for having read the book and written this review. By doing this in English, she threw the book in the midst of a debate that is raging internationally in the left, thus amplifying my voice far beyond the audience the book was originally meant for. I have great doubts whether the book deserves this attention. But I can only thank her for giving me the occasion to explain some of its central ideas to an English-speaking audience
The book appeared in a very precise (…)
- Resistance Work” of Women Workers
- Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism
- The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo
- Marx, Communism and Degrowth
- The life of an unorthodox Marxist
- Saito, Marx and the Anthropocene
- Revisiting Rosa Luxemburg’s Writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution
- Boycott “celebrities” and companies that endanger the lives and violate the dignity of oppressed people
- Black Mirror back to back
- Ai Wei Wei making sense
- The book about the book
- Abolition. Feminism. Now.
- Making the invisible, visible
- Ukraine: voices of resistance and solidarity
- Saito: the metabolic rift and de-growth communism
- US: DSA and the Democratic Party
- Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin and Revolutionary Russia
- Dust Bowl Chronicler
- Surveying Revolutionary Thought
- The U.S. South and Labor’s Fate
- Dissidents Among Dissidents
- The American Caste System
- The Turkish State Today
- Introduction to Marxist Theory: Selected Writings by Ernest Mandel
- Engaging Federici on Marx, Capitalism, and Social Reproduction
- What Is Social Reproduction Theory Trying to Explain?
- Going to see ‘Belfast’ by Kenneth Branagh
- Belfast
- Rescued from history, Rome’s dissident Communist partisans
- Forty Years Later, Reds Is Still One of the Best Films Ever Made About Revolutionary Politics
- What Was Chinese Trotskyism?
- A Labor Warrior Enabled
- Theorizing trans liberation
- Revisiting the Jewish question
- Bringing Malcolm to Life
- Climate struggle on a radicalized track
- Daniel Bensaïd The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor
- The Republic of Ireland: A socialist Rosetta Stone
- Adrienne Rich, Trailblazer
- The Paris Commune: an ode to emancipation
- Shifting Identities in a Settler Land
- A Leftist Perspective on China’s Environmental Destruction
- Not a Cause for Palestinians Only
- When Liberals Fail on Palestine
- Marxisms and Transitions
- Conceiving Decolonization
- Zionist Colonization and Its Victim
- Syria’s Labor Communist Party, a rich political history
- Indonesia as Testing Ground
- Hong Kong: An Uprising and Its Fate
- Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution
- James Baldwin for Our Time
- “I will show your illustrious Lordship what a woman can do”
- Hong Kong’s Fight for Democracy
- Extracting the Andes
- Socialisms: A critical debate
- Socialism will never work, it’s human nature innit?
- Prophet Prolonged….?
- “Why it is worth preparing for breaches to open in these two systems and strive for socialism”
- Global Fever
- Hong Kong in revolt and The Art of Rebellion
- The Fight for Indigenous Liberation
- Questions without Answers: The Dutch and German Communist Left
- Dead Trotskyists Society: Provocative Presence of a Difficult Past
- Why Salvini could become Prime Minister of Italy
- “Chinese model of (hyper) development, and its disastrous ecological consequences”
- “Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers”
- The Struggle Against Dalit Oppression in India
- The Romance of American Communism
- More than a Left Foot
- The Living Flame
- “Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey”
- Bohrer’s loving, fuming critique
- Understanding the Holocaust
- Prophets Unarmed. Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo
- Looking at Social Reproduction
- More than a cultist
- “Winter in the Bookshop”
- The Power of Gulf Capitalism
- Syria’s Unfinished Revolution
- Heroism of reason
- An Unrepentant ’68er’s Life
- A paradigm of modern barbarism
- Was Marx an ecologist?
- Decolonial Communism reviewed
- Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism
- The Patriarchal Stranglehold
- Desperately seeking socialism
- From Marx to Ecosocialism
- The state of Northern Ireland and the democratic deficit. Between sectarianism and neoliberalism
- Nicolas Calas: The Trotskyist Time Forgot
- Reassessing Trotsky’s biography of Stalin
- Money, Markets, and Monarchies
- Assessing Deng Xiaoping
- The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous
- Mourn, then organise again
- Towards a Gay Communism
- Class war on new ground
- Trotskyism in China
- Hugo Blanco: From Trotskyism to Indigenous Vitality
- A revolutionary for life
- Returns of Marxism: Marxist Theory in a Time of Crisis
- Political education: someone’s done it better
- Transnational Solidarity on the Gay and Lesbian Left: An Interview With Emily Hobson
- Merry Month of May: A Firsthand History of ’68 France
- A guide for a future 68
- Is Fascism Inevitable?
- Making Gaza “Uninhabitable”: A Requiem
- History From Below
- This Land Is Our Land
- After Alienation
- Memories of Struggle and Despair in the Philippines
- "I am not your Negro"
- The Politics of Some Bodies
- Getting Away With It: Israel and Global Occupation
- Marxist and Feminist Interventions
- Redeeming the revolution
- Where Did Our Red Love Go?
- Survival Is the Question
- “October 1917 - Workers in Power”
- Fossil Capital - a review
- Playing the whore: the work of sex work
- Women of Dada and Their Times
- The age of the Antropocene
- Suffragette - a film to see
- Climate Change: A Radical Primer
- A Memoir of Life in Struggle
- A Reponse on Trotsky
- Reaching for Revolution
- China: Workers Rising?
- Horizons for a New Left
- Anti-Capitalism & Queer Liberation
- Anthropocene Mass extinction
- Between the Power and the Dream
- Even Better the Second Time Around: Reflections on an Updated Socialist-Feminist Classic
- Crisis and Strategy: On Daniel Bensaïd’s “The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin”
- The New Militant Minority
- “A most intelligent and insightful presentation of Trotsky’s thought and historical action”
- Fifty Shades of Pulp
- Eslanda Robeson’s Journey
- We Are Alive: A film about the thought, activism and legacy of Daniel Bensaïd
- Feminism, Marxism: Marriage or Divorce?
- Marx and the Family Revisited
- The New “Russian Question” of the Twenty-First Century
- Science and Sex: Hirschfeld’s Legacy
- How Much Does Climate Change Change?
- The myths of Indian nationalism
- Decolonizing North America
- Sri Lanka: Lessons from the Left
- Dear Love of Comrades: The politics of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
- A readable, robust and unapologetic feminist voice
- Piketty on Capital and Inequality
- One Step Up, Three Steps Down
- The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
- An Impatient Life: A Memoir
- “Green Capitalism: why it can’t work”: A book to stimulate discussion
- Ernie Tate’s memoirs from the fifties and sixties
- Daniel Bensaïd: Repeated disappointments
- Astonished by the present – The impatient life of Daniel Bensaïd
- “Revolutionary Activism” 1955-1970 – Learning from our history Volume 1, Canada 1955-65 268 pp, C$15.00. Volume 2, Britain 1965-70, 395 pp, C$21.00 London: Resistance Books, 2014.
- Disability and labor ?in the United States
- Can capitalism prevent catastrophic climate change?
- What can we do with what Thomas Piketty teaches us about capital in the twenty-first century?
- Daniel Bensaïd: An Impatient Life, A Memoir
- Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir by Ernest Tate
- Daniel Bensaïd’s Slow Impatience
- Go forward to meet the new: Daniel Bensaid’s “An Impatient Life”
- Struggling for the right of existence; the memoirs of Daniel Bensaïd
- The Arab Revolutions: The Game’s Not Over Yet
- Dangerous Liaisons: Revolutionary Theory and Practice
- A German Lenin?
- Freedom Now Vision Unfinished
- Chatting with an old Trot
- The Politics of Extractivism
- Why the state matters and the USA still dominates capitalism worldwide
- The spirit of those frenzied days
- The Passion of Richard Seymour
- Fraternising With the Enemy
- “Chinese Revolutionary”
- A tour de force on the state of health care internationally
- The Arab Spring – results and prospects
- Palestinians and the Queer Left
- The H-Block Struggle
- China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility by Au Loong Yu (with contributions from Bai Ruixue, Bruno Jetin & Pierre Russet)
- Dangerous Liaisons
- China’s Rise – Strength and Fragility
- A Bend in the Labyrinth
- Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy
- Elections in Mexico: Why López Obrador?
- Atzmon’s Mistaken "Identity"
- The Politics of Integrity versus the Politics of Celebrity
- Arab and Arab American Feminist Narratives
- Why Marx was right
- Rosa Luxemburg: in the storm of struggle
- Lenin Reconsidered
- The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon & its Consequences
- Why the revolt in Egypt?
- Marx and the non-Western World
- Stieg Larsson in the Struggle
- Renewed interest in class struggle?
- Arabs and the Holocaust
- Towards a Queer Marxism?
- Trotsky lives!
- A systematic biography of Ernest Mandel
- Destiny of a Revolutionary
- Arab Sexualities
- Thirty years after: A critical introduction to the Marxism of Ernest Mandel
- "After Socialism" - Sad Outcomes
- After a long wait..."Critical Notes" from Che
- Empire’s Island in a Sea of Struggle
- SR Books publishes third title - "Ecosocialism or Barbarism"
- "It’s never too late to love or rebel"
- The revival of a political tradition
- Liberation, Then What?
- On a Recent Book by John Holloway
- Rough Music
- Condition critical - health care under neoliberalism
- Mao in Question
- The US SWP in the 1960s - Two reviews
- ¡Cochabamba! - Story of the Water Wars
- David Mandel’s ‘Labour After Communism’
- Direct Democracy in Brazil
- Change the world - without taking power?
- From the Resistance to the new movements
- "Neither imitation nor copy"
- Neo-liberalism’s fatal flaws
- Revolutionary internationalism and the national question
- Marx and Engels: Democratic revolutionaries
- The philosophy of revolution
- Empire and Revolution
- Failed crusade?
- Making peace with America
- Reflections on globalisation
- On Fausto Bertinotti’s book
- Gays and the Left: Scratching the Surface
