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...
Marxist Archive
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...
The 1905 Revolution
During 1904, Russian defeats in the war with Japan provoked a surge of liberal bourgeois opposition to the tsarist autocracy. This significant change in the Russian political scene deepened the differences between Menshevism and...
Bolshevism vs. Menshevism: The 1903 Split
The Second Congress of the RSDRP, held in Brussels and then London in July-August 1903, was to be the culmination of the Iskraist project to create a centralized party based on a comprehensive program....
Kautskyism and the Origins of Russian Social Democracy
Recently the British International Marxist Group (IMG) and the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party—SWP/IS), two of the largest groups of the British “far left,” have taken to revising the history of the Bolsheviks....