One of the magnificent features of the Arab revolutions is the ruthless manner in which they have exposed the dirty, duplicitous, hypocritical, blood-soaked truth about the global political establishment. As the revolutionary wave spread to envelop almost the whole of North Africa and the Middle East, Western politicians, diplomats, university heads, business executives and government bureaucrats squirmed, as evidence of their ties with the despots of the Arab world circulated across the internet.
Sandra Bloodworth attacks the persistent myths and misconceptions about "Leninism with an examination of Lenin's writings and activities as he struggled to build a revolutionary party.
Omar Hassan confronts the myth that the Assad dynasty in Syria was ever socialist or anti-imperialist.
Sandra Bloodworth looks at the impact of identity politics on some of the best feminist and social historians of the Russian revolution.
Sandra Bloodworth draws on the French experience to refute reformist calls for a revival of Popular Front strategies.
David Lockwood analyses the social, political and economic factors that precipitated the heroic Tiananmen Square movement.
Robert Bollard looks at the history of the crisis in former Yugoslavia.
Anne Picot debunks the commonly held idea that the USSR was an example of a planned economy.
Marxist historian Robert Bollard surveys a range of responses to Mikhail Gorbachev on the broad left, and finds them wanting.
Darren Roso reviews a new biography of Werner Scholem, a leading figure in the ultra-left faction of the German Communist Party during the tumultuous Weimar republic.
Mick Armstrong surveys the many debates that emerged during the founding of the CPA, drawing out lessons for contemporary revolutionaries.
Ian Birchall reviews the final Notebooks of Victor Serge, written between 1936 and 1947.
Jordan Humphreys uncovers the forgotten history of the early Communist Party's role in the fight for Indigenous rights.
US socialist Joel Geier recounts how a debate on soviet imperialism and the Hitler-Stalin pact led to a crisis in Trotskyism and the birth of the International Socialist tradition.
Vashti Fox explains how Stalinism enabled and at times collaborated with fascist movements and states during the 1930s and ’40s, while the Stalinised Communist Parties undermined revolutionary working-class anti-fascism – a history that has important lessons for fighting the far right today.
Mick Armstrong traces the development of Trotskyism in the context of the far left in Australia.
Tess Lee Ack looks back at the workers’ uprising in June 1953, the first challenge to the Stalinist monolith in Eastern Europe.