CDLM: WSL’s “Short Cut” to Nowhere
The recall conference of the “Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement” (CDLM) promises to be pretty much a rerun of the October 24 founding conference — when Workers Socialist League (WSL) members and...
Other materials from the revolutionary period of the Spartacists
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30] Reply to the GuardianTHE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED 1....
The Port Kembla pig-iron boycott of 1938
Labour Boycotts vs imperialist sanctions Published in Australasian Spartacist no 57, September 1978 The past decade has seen a proliferation of campaigns for economic boycotts of various sorts. Reformists and liberals have urged consumers to boycott...
The Rebirth of British Trotskyism
One Fifth of WSL Walks Out, Fuses with the iSt Workers Vanguard, No. 200, 7 April 1978 LONDON—When 24 supporters of the Trotskyist Faction (TF) walked out of the Workers Socialist League (WSL) at the...
In Defense of Democratic Centralism
A speech by James Robertson The speech below was given to a conference of the West German Spartacus (Bolschewiki-Leninisten) in February 1973. Spartacus/BL had derived from a December 1972 split in the Internationale Kommunisten...
Bibliography
Baron, Samuel H., Plekhanov, Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford, 1963) Cliff, Tony, Lenin, Volume 1: Building the Party (London, 1975) Dan, Theodore, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York, 1970) G., Barbara, Democratic Centralism (Chicago, 1972) Gankin, Olga Hess and Fisher, H.H., eds., The...
Toward the Communist International
The event which transformed Lenin from a Russian revolutionary social democrat into the founding leader of the world communist movement can be precisely dated—4 August 1914. With the start of World War I the...
The Final Split with the Mensheviks
Following Stolypin’s coup of June 1907, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) was illegalized and its Duma representatives arrested. Party fractions could continue to exist in legal and semi-legal workers organizations (e.g., trade...
The Struggle Against the Boycotters
The Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, held in London in May 1907, was almost evenly divided between the Bolsheviks with 89 delegate votes and the Mensheviks with 88. At the Fourth Congress a year...
Party, Faction & “Freedom of Criticism”
The emergence of differences with the Mensheviks over the role of bourgeois liberalism in the revolution weakened, but did not eliminate, the forces of conciliationism in the Bolshevik camp. At the all-Bolshevik Third Congress...