The annulment and reimposition of the "crime of sodomy" and the creation of the first homosexual liberation movement. Magnus Hirschfeld's collaboration with the Social Democratic Party of Germany for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Homosexual liberation and women's liberation in the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany. The decriminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Russia and the laws against minor prostitution in Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The persecution of Magnus Hirschfeld by the Nazis and the recriminalization of homosexuality in the Soviet Union by Stalin.
The history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky remains, more than 80 years after Trotsky's death, largely terra incognita or, more accurately, a bazaar for all manner of sects to sell their myths. Only once in a while does a work emerge that takes the history of Trotskyism out of the realm of mythology and provides us with the elements we need to reconstruct the actual experience of Trotskyist militants in a given time and place. In this sense, this brief work has no other purpose than to provide a general overview of international experiences linked to Trotskyism in the second half of the 20th century in order to advance in a circumstantial understanding of its history and development.
Este artículo examina el análisis del historiador Stephen F. Cohen (1928-2020) sobre lo que llamó la "Nueva Guerra Fría", es decir, la confrontación entre Estados Unidos y Rusia provocada por la expansión, impulsada por Estados Unidos, de la OTAN a Europa del Este. El marco teórico es la teoría del imperialismo y la metodología consiste en el análisis de fuentes primarias, trabajos académicos y artículos periodísticos. La conclusión es que el análisis de Cohen fue vindicado por el estallido de la guerra actual en Ucrania, pero que su visión "ruso-céntrica" es demasiado estrecha, por lo que su análisis debe ser colocado en el contexto global más grande dentro del cual la guerra en Ucrania tiene lugar: la doble agresión de Estados Unidos contra Rusia y China.
Abstract The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers' parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the Revolution of October 1917. This article outlines the cooperation between the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee led by Magnus Hirschfeld and Social Democracy to decriminalise homosexuality by removing Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code before the First World War. It also describes the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia under Lenin, with the adoption of the first Soviet Penal Code in June 1922, and Magnus Hirschfeld's relations with prominent figures of the early Soviet government such as N.A. Semashko, the first People's Commissar of Public Health, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People's Commissar for Education. Those ties ceased with the Nazis' rise to power in January 1933, which resulted in the destruction of the institutions created by Hirschfeld, such as the Institute for Sexual Science and the World League for Sexual Reform, while in the Soviet Union itself Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in March 1934, shortly before Hirschfeld's death, linking homosexuality and fascism.
Abstract In Marxist circles it is common to refer to Karl Marx's The Civil War in France for a theoretical analysis of the historical significance of the Paris Commune, and to Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray's History of the Commune of 1871 for a description of the facts surrounding the insurrection of the Paris workers and its repression by the National Assembly led by Adolphe Thiers. What is less well-known is that Marx himself oversaw the German translation of Lissagaray's book and made numerous additions to it. In this article we describe Marx's addenda to Lissagaray's work, showing how they contribute to concretising his analysis of the Paris Commune and how they relate to the split in the International Working Men's Association between Marxists and anarchists that took place after the Commune's defeat. We also show how Marx's additions to the German version of Lissagaray's book were linked to his involvement with the recently created Socialist Workers' Party of Germany and to his criticism of the programme it had adopted at the congress celebrated in the city of Gotha.
AbstractThe origins of the Transitional Programme in Trotsky's writings have been traced in the secondary literature. Much less attention has been paid to the earlier origins of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International between its Third and Fourth Congress, and in particular to the contribution of its largest national section outside Russia, the German Communist Party, which had been the origin of the turn to the united-front tactic in 1921. This article attempts to uncover the roots of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International. This task is important because it shows that the Transitional Programme's slogans are not sectarian shibboleths, but the result of the collective revolutionary experience of the working class during the period under consideration, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the founding conference of the Fourth International (1917–38).
During its first four congresses, held annually under Lenin (1919–22), the Communist International went through two distinct phases: while the first two congresses focused on programmatic and organisational aspects of the break with Social-Democratic parties (such as the 'Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', adopted by the first congress, and the 21 'Conditions of Admission to the Communist International', adopted by the second), the third congress, meeting after the putsch known as the 'March Action' of 1921 in Germany, adopted the slogan 'To the masses!', while the fourth codified this new line in the 'Theses on the Unity of the Proletarian Front'. The arguments put forward by the first two congresses were originally drafted by leaders of the Russian Communist Party, but the initiative for the adoption of the united-front policy came from the German Communist Party under the leadership of Paul Levi. This article explores the historical circumstances that turned the German Communists into the pioneers of the united-front tactic. In the documentary appendix we add English versions of two documents drafted by Levi: the 'Letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany' on the Kapp Putsch, dated 16 March 1920, and thekpd's 'Open Letter' of 8 January 1921, which gave rise to the united-front tactic.
In 1911 Rudolf Hilferding, the author of the famous book Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, published an article on the history of English mercantilism in Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany edited by Karl Kautsky. The writing of the article was motivated by the publication, the previous year, of the third volume of Theories of Surplus-Value, containing Marx's analysis of the work of Richard Jones, as well as by the simultaneous appearance of a German edition of Thomas Mun's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade. This article introduces the present author's English translation of Hilferding's article on mercantilism, titled "The Early Days of English Political Economy," previously available only in German, and contextualizes it in the framework of the history of Marxist scholarship.