The marking of the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, the prelude to the liberation of France, presents an opportunity to make available two brief texts on the role of the Stalinists in the resistance. The first comes from the extremely interesting short book Internationalists in France During the Second World War by […]
Tag Archives: Trotskyism
The editors of Revolutionary History have announced the upcoming release of the new issue of their journal, which will focus on the relationship of the European far left and the Algerian revolution. It includes a paper by the Cliffite historian Ian Birchall on the activities of Socialisme ou Barbarie. Regretably, there is no U.S. counterpart […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available the text of a 1947 letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to Natalia Sedova Trotsky, Russian revolutionary and widow of Leon Trotsky. Dunayevskaya served as Russian language secretary to Trotsky in 1937 and 1938 during the period of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry and became close to Natalia. The position […]
The Big Game Benjamin Péret ; translated with an introduction by Marilyn Kallet. Black Widow Press, 357 pages. Black Widow Press has released a translation (by Marilyn Kallet) of The Big Game, a 1928 work by Surrealist Benjamin Péret. In addition to being André Breton’s most committed Surrealist co-thinker, Péret was the the Surrealist most […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1961 column by Raya Dunayavskaya (“Tito’s Turnabout“) on the U.S.S.R.’s Khruschev-era reconcilliation with Yugoslavia. This piece serves as a bracing antidote to the Marshal Tito nostalgia which one encounters from time to time, particularly with regards to what was called the system of “workers’ self-management.” One point […]
The new issue of Against the Current features a long essay by historian Alan Wald on the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (“A Winter’s Tale Told in Memoirs“), of which he was a member in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is safe to characterize the piece as largely an exercise in SWP nostalgia and […]
Several weeks ago, Criticism &c. noticed a statement released by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative on the subject of the Libyan revolt and U.S. and NATO intervention (“Support Libyan Rebels While Opposing U.S./NATO Intervention“—March 12, 2011). At that time, comment was not deemed worth the effort involved. Upon a second reading, however, at least one distortion of […]
News & Letters has compiled a list of all of the texts by Raya Dunayevskaya that have been reproduced in the print and online versions of the newspaper since 1997. Needless to say, there is much of great interest here. A cursory set of recommendations includes: A Restatement of Some Fundamentals of Marxism against ‘pseudo-Marxism’ […]
Wakefield Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts will publish in April The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, a collection of works by Benjamin Perét, one of the most committed of Surrealists and an important participant in the international Trotskyist movement (he helped found the Trotskyist movement in Brazil). Unfortunately, Perét is not widely translated into […]
The massive ongoing uprising in Egypt provides us with an opportunity to recall an almost forgotten group of revolutionaries and artists—the Egyptian Surrealists. Robin Kelley and the late Franklin Rosemont included them in the book Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (reviewed earlier on Criticism &c.), but I recently came […]
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