Coups, putsches and revolutions
Not only real, but counterfactual history too, can provide valuable political insights. Derek James reports on the Spring Communist University, held over the long bank holiday weekend of April 30-May 3
Organised by the CPGB and Labour Party Marxists, Spring 2021 CU, was designed, in part, to cast a sharp light on the momentous January 6 events in Washington. Titled ‘Coups, putsches and revolutions’, its aim was, though, designed not just to assess what exactly happened with Donald Trump, Capitol Hill, the boogaloos, the DC police and the servile GOP establishment, but to provide a much wider picture, so that we can draw operative conclusions when it comes to our own revolutionary practice in the future.
Class Consciousness and Working Class Emancipation
Discussion with the Angry Workers of the World (AWW)
This article originally began as a response to the AWW’s reply to our review of their book Class Power on Zero Hours in Revolutionary Perspectives 16.(1) However, as we were writing it, the AWW published another blog article entitled “The necessity of a revolutionary working class program in times of coup and civil war scenarios”(2) in which we can see that the promised move towards organisation and an escape from reformist demand struggles mentioned at the end of Class Power on Zero Hours has indeed taken some shape.
100 Years Since Livorno
In January 1921, more than three years after the October Revolution in Russia, some two years since the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin at the behest of the German Social Democratic Party, and in the aftermath of two wasted years of workers’ factory occupations in Italy itself, the intransigent revolutionaries in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), led by Amadeo Bordiga, finally won the day and broke from the old party of compromise and accommodation with capital to form the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I).
To commemorate the centenary of this bitter/sweet event, we join with our comrades in Italy in re-publishing an article written by Onorato Damen for the fiftieth anniversary in 1971. In the run-up to Livorno, Damen himself was one of those who had been pushing for a clear split with Social Democratic fudging and against the idea that the Third Communist International could justifiably include elements who dithered and ultima