Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
What the world remembers about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were the students. But above all, it was a mass workers’ uprising for socialist democracy.
Public discourse on the 1989 Tiananmen Democracy Movement has been dominated by two narratives. The most prevalent interprets the (...)
Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo Gregor Benton, editor Brill Historical Materialism Series, 2015; Haymarket Books, 2017, xvii + 1289 pages, $55 paperback.
JUST OVER 70 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) extinguished the last (...)
Frank Dikötter is the best-selling popular historian of China today. In his latest work on the post-Mao years, Dikötter joins a long line of those predicting the speedy demise of the Chinese system, letting ideology get in the way of analysis.
Review of China After Mao: The Rise of a (...)
Different translations show the nuances in the relationship between China and Russia over nearly a century.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s reaction in response to the Russian aggression has been fiercely debated in the western media. The majority of the discussions have (...)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: ON July 6th, 2022, Trotskyist social movement activist and co-founder of Pioneer Group (先驅社) [formerly Sun Miu Group (新苗社)], Xiang Qing (向青), passed away in Macau at age 100. Xiang was born in 1922, studied at National Southwest Association University (西南聯合大學), encountering (...)
What does it mean to speak of Chinese Trotskyism, and what is its relevance for us today? While early leaders of the Left Opposition in China were some of the key founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the most knowledgeable readers of Marx, this tradition had also been (...)
What does it mean to speak of Chinese Trotskyism, and what is its relevance for us today?
While early leaders of the Left Opposition in China were some of the key founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the most knowledgeable readers of Marx, this tradition had also been (...)
What is the relationship of leadership to revolution (and counter-revolution)? How do socialists adequately adjust their tactics to new and changing situations? What is the role of national liberation struggle in the international revolution? Can socialists struggle with classes other than the (...)
Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought, Brill, Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 210, Leiden, 2020. 326 pp., €150.00 hb ISBN 9789004358904 Reviewed by Fabian Van Onzen
There has been a lot of interest in Maoism in recent years. A number of recent books have appeared that seriously engage (...)
A discussion and book launch for ’Mao Zedong Thought’ by Wang Fanxi published by Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill/Haymarket
Date and time: Tue, 7 September 2021 20:00 – 22:00 CEST
Recorded on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mz23H7iTaWM
There have been many books on Mao Zedong, but (...)
The Communist Party of China led three revolutions of world-historic significance in its short 100-year-history: national liberation, the “Cultural Revolution,” and China’s rapid capitalist transformation.
July 1, 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Community Party, one of the (...)
A new generation is fighting back
The great 1989 democratic movement started as a student movement and then made common cause with the workers who joined the movement with the slogan “down with guandao” (bureaucrats involved in market speculation). The regime then realized that there was (...)
The Chinese revolution is one of the major events of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it covers the entire period from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution to the end of the 1960s, when the People’s Republic descended into the conflicts of the ill-named “Cultural Revolution”. (...)
Abstract
Lu Xun was a giant of modern Chinese literature and a fellow-traveller of the Chinese Communists, to whom he saw no alternative at a time of rampant fascism and the threat of war. However, he was also an admirer of Trotsky, although this fact has been expertly hidden from sight for (...)
In only two countries – Sri Lanka and Bolivia – did Trotskyists ever rise to prominence in national politics, and they did so in remarkably ‘unTrotskyist’ ways, not least by joining Popular Front governments. In the communist parties of China and Vietnam, however, (...)
Despite its massive length, Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History doesn’t offer us a clear way to understand Maoism and its legacy.
Fifty years ago, a remote Chinese region, Dao County, was caught in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. In some weeks, thousands were murdered. Most (...)
Excerpt from “Red Dust,” part 2 of our economic history and will soon be for sale via AK Press. The complete contents will also be published on our website for free this summer.
By the mid-1980s, a small but increasing number of urbanites had broken out of the iron rice bowl of the danwei (...)
Last week we published reflections on the 30th anniversary of China’s ‘May of the Masses’ [see below]. Here Charlie Hore reflects on the massacre of 4 June and its aftermath.
‘Since the early 1980s, the Communist Party’s greatest fear had been of a Polish-style Solidarity uprising led by (...)
The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown, edited by Bao Pu, Hong Kong: New Century Press, 362 pp., HK$158.00.
When Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun began publishing articles last year criticizing the government’s turn toward a harsher variety of authoritarianism, (...)
Deng Xiaoping was one of the most important Communist leaders of the twentieth century. Celebrated by the West for his pro-market reforms, leftists should be more skeptical of his accomplishments.
Review of Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Deng Xiaoping, A Revolutionary Life, New (...)
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