One Long Night, 1936-38 -- Striking Against the Gulag, 1947-53 -- The Vengeance of History, 1989-91 -- The Peasant-in-Uniform -- Urban Intellectuals and the Agrarian Question -- Poland and Georgia: the Export of Revolution -- Germany and Hungary: the United Front -- Trotsky on Stalinism: The Surplus and the Machine -- A Movement's Dirty Linen -- Lenin and Leninism: Moving Beyond Reverence -- Intellectuals and the Working Class.
It is now more than 30 years since the launch of the bilateral:anada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), predecessor to the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the (now abandoned) Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For a generation, these "free trade" initiatives provided an important part of the framework in which political movements developed in Canada, engendering debates and controversies which continue to this day. When a new moment of trade politics emerged with Donald Trump's challenge to NAFTA, some veterans from those earlier anti-free trade battles were unable to see the new, white nationalist terrain upon which Trump was operating. This article - organized principally around the author's own engagement with the anti-free trade movements of the 1980s - suggests that this inability to see clearly the new context of anti-free trade politics was rooted in the incomplete and contradictory left-nationalist theory which underpinned most anti-free trade politics of that earlier era. The article suggests that while there are national questions in Canada - in particular those associated with Indigenous peoples and with Quebec - the attempt to articulate a parallel "national question" in Canada as a whole has proven to be impossible.
It is now more than 30 years since the launch of the bilateral:anada-U.S. Free TradeAgreement (CUFTA), predecessor to the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) and the (now abandoned) Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For a generation,these "free trade" initiatives provided an important part of the framework in which politicalmovements developed in Canada, engendering debates and controversies which continue to thisday. When a new moment of trade politics emerged with Donald Trump's challenge to NAFTA,some veterans from those earlier anti-free trade battles were unable to see the new, whitenationalist terrain upon which Trump was operating. This article - organized principally aroundthe author's own engagement with the anti-free trade movements of the 1980s - suggests that thisinability to see clearly the new context of anti-free trade politics was rooted in the incomplete andcontradictory left-nationalist theory which underpinned most anti-free trade politics of that earlierera. The article suggests that while there are national questions in Canada - in particular thoseassociated with Indigenous peoples and with Quebec - the attempt to articulate a parallel "nationalquestion" in Canada as a whole has proven to be impossible.
We are entering the centenary of the revolutionary upheavals which convulsed Europe and Asia in the wake of the First World War. Sustained by those upheavals, a new left emerged grappling with the daunting challenges of trying to create an alternative to capitalism and war. John Riddell's three decades of effort to make available the proceedings of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International (Comintern) are part of a new generation working to make available to an English speaking audience some of the key disucssions and deliberations of the left in that era. His latest volume – "To the Masses" – surveying the discussions of the Third Comintern Congress completes this work. Focussing on the united front – what a contemporary left would call "coalition building" – the book is an invaluable resource both to our understanding of this period, and to the challenges our new left faces in the still ongoing struggle against capitalism and war.
A reply, in part, to contributions to the book launches for Escape from the Staple Trap at Historical Materialism 2016 (Toronto) and Socialist Studies 2016 (Calgary) as well as those published in this issue.
A reply, in part, to contributions to the book launches for Escape from the Staple Trap at Historical Materialism 2016 (Toronto) and Socialist Studies 2016 (Calgary) as well as those published in this issue.
In: Rethinking marxism: RM ; a journal of economics, culture, and society ; official journal of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis, Band 27, Heft 4, S. 558-570