On 2 March 1921, sailors in Kronstadt took up arms against the young Soviet government. The rebellion was short-lived and crushed by 18 March. But its tale has survived much longer and has been told and retold with very little concern for facts and serious analysis. The present work will not rehash chronological details of the rebellion in depth, which readers can find in great detail in many other works. Instead, it will outline the underlying processes that gave rise to the rebellion, looking beyond mere appearances to its real character, and explain the actions taken by the Bolsheviks against it.

The Dawn of Everything, by the anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, and archaeologist, David Wengrow, has been widely promoted as a radical new vision of human history both in the mainstream press and on the left. In this article Joel Bergman subjects this work to a rigorous Marxist critique, and exposes the fatal flaws inherent in the authors’ idealist view of historical development.

The oppression of women and the origins of the family as we know it remain key issues facing anyone who wishes to fight for a better world today. Huge numbers of women still suffer sexual abuse and harassment. In some parts of the world they live in slave-like conditions. Millions of girls and women alive today have been forced to undergo female genital mutilation, one of the most barbaric methods used to control women’s sexuality, while millions of young women are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Violence against women is still an everyday occurrence, with femicide a continuing phenomenon.

2023 marked the 30 years since the shelling of the White House in Moscow, at the time of which the first bourgeois-democratic parliament of Russia, the Russian Supreme Council, was meeting. Hundreds of people died in a ‘mini civil war’ on the streets of Moscow. Indeed, this was a civil war between President Yeltsin and parliament.

This article, marking 60 years since the end of the Algerian war of national liberation, appeared in Révolution, the paper of the French section of the International Marxist Tendency, in March 2022.

The fall of the short-lived Second French Republic in December 1851 marks one of the most rapid and complete reversals in modern political history. Born out of the February Revolution of 1848, the Republic appeared to promise a new era of progress and democracy for the whole of Europe. But this proved to be a false dawn. In less than four years the most democratic republic on Earth was transformed into its opposite: the naked dictatorship of Napoleon III.

27 July of this year marks the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which halted the three-year-long, all-out conflict known as the Korean War. The Armistice is not a peace agreement, and the two states that exist on the Korean Peninsula to the north and south of the 38th parallel are technically still at war with each other.

Issue 42 of In Defence of Marxism magazine is available to pre-order now! Alan Woods’ editorial, which we publish here, looks at the Marxist view of the state and the role of the individual in history – unifying themes in this issue. This issue includes a Marxist critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; an analysis of the class struggle in the Roman Republic by Alan Woods; a look at the rise of ‘authoritarian’ governments and the Marxist view of Bonapartism; a review of Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy; and Trotsky’s invaluable article, Bonapartism and Fascism.

The English Revolution of the 17th Century stands as one of the first great bourgeois revolutions in history. In only a few decades, it shattered the rotting feudal system and paved the way for the development of capitalism worldwide. For Marxists, these decades are full of lessons.

1848 was a year of revolution in Europe, with French workers rising up and exploding onto the streets in a struggle against the old order. Today, as Marx wrote then, a spectre is once again haunting the ruling classes – the spectre of communism.

The American Civil War is an event of world-historic significance. This revolutionary war, which consumed US society for four long and bloody years, overthrew slavery as a mode of exploitation and laid the ground for the rapid development of US capitalism. This episode in the class struggle graphically demonstrated the dynamics of revolution, and should be studied by all class-conscious workers and youth.

90 years ago, on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, paving the way for the dictatorship of the Nazis. In this extract, Ted Grant analyses and explains the events that enabled the fascists to come to power.

We are very happy to share the recollections of a member of our French organisation (Révolution), who was born in Moscow in the 1960s, and later moved to Paris, joining the PCF (Communist Party of France) and eventually the IMT. There, he discovered Trotsky’s writings, which accurately reflected the comrade’s experiences of the bureaucratic regime in the USSR. This is a fascinating insight into what life was really like in the USSR (both good and bad),

In the course of his life, Lenin made several visits to London. The first and longest took place in 1902, and lasted for over a year. He made other visits to attend the congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903, 1905 and 1907, and he returned again in 1908 and 1911 to undertake studies at the British Museum. As of late, there has been a growing interest in retracing Lenin’s footsteps across the city. A fascinating ‘cottage industry’ has grown up around this subject, even encompassing Lenin Walks in the British capital.

Today marks one hundred years since French troops invaded the Ruhr. This occupation, combined with hyperinflation, sparked revolutionary convulsions across Germany. With crisis once again haunting Europe, Rob Sewell examines the lessons of 1923.

For a century, the ruling class has produced industrial quantities of lies and distortions about Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party and of the October Revolution of 1917. This article, therefore, sheds an important light on the life of this revolutionary giant. Covering the formative years of Lenin’s life, the following article – first published in issue 36 of In defence of Marxism magazine, gives a portrait of Lenin in his youth: from his boyhood years, to his making as a revolutionary, the founding of Iskra up until the eve of the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, out of which the Bolshevik

Forty-two years ago this week, South Korea was engulfed in the flames of class struggle. Amidst the fight by the masses for democracy and to bring down the military, a heroic episode took place in Gwangju – a city of nearly one million people. The workers beat back a vicious military, and for a few days the working class de facto took over the running of the city, which was briefly under the control of armed workers’ militias.

There are many myths surrounding Lenin and the Bolsheviks – particularly regarding the origins of the revolutionary party in Russia. Rob Sewell examines an important chapter from the history of Bolshevism, and the lessons for Marxists today.

The French Revolution initiated a decades-long phase of bourgeois revolutions across Europe and beyond that raised the flags of democracy, national liberation, and civil rights against the injustices of the feudal system. These political convulsions prepared the ground for the international ascendancy of the capitalist system in the nineteenth century. Yet in most countries, the democratic promises of the bourgeois revolution remained largely unfulfilled. The Greek war of independence that began over 200 years ago was no exception.

13 April 2022 marked 80 years since the Dutch revolutionary socialist Henk Sneevliet, along with six of his comrades, were executed by the Nazi German occupiers. Sneevliet devoted his whole life to fighting for the interests of the working class of the Netherlands, as well as the oppressed in Indonesia and China.