We’ll always have Petrograd

October: the story of the Russian Revolution China Miéville Verso, 2017 An enormous amount of intellectual effort is necessary to unearth what significance, if any, the Russian revolutions of 1917 hold for us today. Before it is possible to do so, the mind must travel backwards from the integrated spectacle of Putin’s Russia to confront, […]

Raya Dunayevskaya on the Crisis in Independent Marxism, circa 1960

Raya Dunayevskaya’s “The World Crisis and the Theoretical Void“, a 1960 article that first appeared in Prometeo, a journal edited by the Italian independent revolutionary Onorato Damen, has just been made available by the Marxists Internet Archive. Dunayevskaya travelled to Europe in late 1959 to attend an international conference in Milan of tendencies adhereing to […]

Paresh Chattopadhyay on Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’

Paresh Chattopadhyay has published an interesting article in the latest issue of Science and Society, the theoretical journal long associated with the Communist Party. In “On the Question of Soviet Socialism,” he replies to an extremely hostile review of Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union by David Laibman, the journal’s current […]

‘The Greatest Power of Shock’

Franklin Rosemont’s 1978 collection of writings by André Breton, What is Surrealism? remains a treasure trove of rare and valuable texts. I have just come across a footnote by Rosemont to “On Proletarian Literature,” an interesting 1933 speech by Breton, which draws attention to the fact that the Surrealists were the first to publish in […]

Lenin, Hegel and Western Surrealism

I first saw reference to the connection between the Surrealists and Lenin’s 1914 Hegel Notebooks in David Roegider’s entry on Surrealism in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Martin Jay notes that it was André Breton who first introduced Henri Lefebrve to Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1924 in his book […]