The period of 1980 to 1981 in Poland was marked by the most intense confrontation between the working class and the Stalinist bureaucracy in history. The working class attempted to take control over the commanding heights over the economy and purge the Stalinists, whose incompetence and betrayal of the ideals of real socialism had brought the country to ruin. It is the task of genuine Communists to retrieve the revolutionary heritage of this period from under a mountain of lies of both capitalists and Stalinists, who disregard the genuine experience of the working class in this period, and slander the revolution itself.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the world and sparked a series of revolutionary events internationally. In this article, Konstantin Korn and Emanuel Tomaselli look at the way the revolutionary process unfolded in Austria towards the end of the First World War, including an overview of the general strike of January 1918, and how the Social-Democratic leaders betrayed the movement.

The First World War brought about the collapse of the Second International at its beginning, and a wave of revolutions towards its end. It was in this context that Lenin successfully built the Third (Communist) International, with powerful sections in many countries, aiming to provide the necessary leadership for the victory of the world revolution.

“Trotsky said long ago that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.” Vladimir Lenin delivered this statement to the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee on 1 November 1917 (Old Style).

Issue 49 of In Defence of Marxism magazine is here! Below we publish Alan Woods’ editorial explaining the true history of WWII – which capitalist historians have obfuscated for decades. Issue 49 also explores the revolutionary legacy of the end of the war, including articles on: the fall of fascism in Italy; the liberation of France; post-war neorealist cinema; and a 1945 analysis by Ted Grant on the shifting world order. Get your copy now!

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution, which began as an uprising against the semi-feudal despotism of Emperor Haile Selassie but would go much further, culminating in the abolition of capitalism in the country. In this article, Ben Curry, gives an account of these dramatic events, and explains the complex processes that shaped the revolution’s course.

50 years ago, after the long postwar boom, the world economy experienced its first truly global crisis. Falling output and spiralling inflation combined to devastate the working class. Today, capitalism faces similar turmoil. It must be overthrown.

In the summer of 1923, Germany found itself in the grip of an intense revolutionary ferment. But this historic opportunity for the working class to seize power was squandered, with devastating implications, not only for Germany, but for the course of the world socialist revolution. In this article, marking the hundredth anniversary of the dramatic failure of the German Revolution in October 1923, Tatjana Pinetzki explains how this situation emerged, the mistakes of the leadership, and the impact of these events on world history.

The Spanish student strike of 1986/87 was an epoch-making movement, lasting three months, involving three million school and university students, with hundreds of thousands in demonstrations, which ended up in a victory against the Socialist Party government. This document, written at the time by Alan Woods, is a blow-by-blow account of the movement which draws out the main political points. Alan was in Spain for most of the struggle, involved in daily discussions with the leading Spanish Marxists which led the movement.

On 2 March 1921, sailors in Kronstadt took up arms against the young Soviet government. The rebellion was short-lived and crushed by 18 March. But its tale has survived much longer and has been told and retold with very little concern for facts and serious analysis. The present work will not rehash chronological details of the rebellion in depth, which readers can find in great detail in many other works. Instead, it will outline the underlying processes that gave rise to the rebellion, looking beyond mere appearances to its real character, and explain the actions taken by the Bolsheviks against it.

The Dawn of Everything, by the anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, and archaeologist, David Wengrow, has been widely promoted as a radical new vision of human history both in the mainstream press and on the left. In this article Joel Bergman subjects this work to a rigorous Marxist critique, and exposes the fatal flaws inherent in the authors’ idealist view of historical development.

The oppression of women and the origins of the family as we know it remain key issues facing anyone who wishes to fight for a better world today. Huge numbers of women still suffer sexual abuse and harassment. In some parts of the world they live in slave-like conditions. Millions of girls and women alive today have been forced to undergo female genital mutilation, one of the most barbaric methods used to control women’s sexuality, while millions of young women are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Violence against women is still an everyday occurrence, with femicide a continuing phenomenon.

2023 marked the 30 years since the shelling of the White House in Moscow, at the time of which the first bourgeois-democratic parliament of Russia, the Russian Supreme Council, was meeting. Hundreds of people died in a ‘mini civil war’ on the streets of Moscow. Indeed, this was a civil war between President Yeltsin and parliament.

This article, marking 60 years since the end of the Algerian war of national liberation, appeared in Révolution, the paper of the French section of the International Marxist Tendency, in March 2022.

The fall of the short-lived Second French Republic in December 1851 marks one of the most rapid and complete reversals in modern political history. Born out of the February Revolution of 1848, the Republic appeared to promise a new era of progress and democracy for the whole of Europe. But this proved to be a false dawn. In less than four years the most democratic republic on Earth was transformed into its opposite: the naked dictatorship of Napoleon III.