Italian Marxist Rossana Rossanda was born 100 years ago today. Her country’s Communist Party sought a gradualist “Italian road to socialism” — but she insisted that the class struggle in Italy was tied to the fate of the world revolution.
For socialists, unions are paradoxical organizations. On the one hand, unions are essential for creating a workers' organization that can oppose capital and challenge it for power. But they are also an insufficient vehicle for mobilizing those workers to transform the world.
One of socialists’ primary aims must be to transform the state — wedding representative democracy to new types of popular power while battling to democratize the authoritarian aspects of the state.
In the 1920s, August Thalheimer was the most important theorist of Germany’s Communist movement. He stood for an independent workers’ movement that forged a path beyond conservative social democracy and authoritarian Stalinism.
Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz was a remarkably creative Polish Marxist thinker who developed a theory of nationalism that was far ahead of its time.
We don’t put coins in street lamps or pay by the minute in public parks. Here’s why we can make subway and bus fares a thing of the past.
On Bastille Day 1889, militants from around the world met in Paris to declare an international union of socialist parties. The Second International promised to spread the spirit of the revolution across borders, only itself to fall victim to nationalist passions.
Theodor Bergmann, the last surviving member of the pre–World War II German Communist movement, spoke to Jacobin.
A hundred years ago today, the German Communists tried to spark a revolution, but their would-be uprising ended in disaster. In this extract from a recently discovered memoir, Rosa Luxemburg’s biographer Paul Frölich describes the failure of the 1921 March Action and its impact.
The Russian-born thinker Raya Dunayevskaya was an important and influential figure on the US radical left. At an early stage, she recognized the need to combine struggles against racism and capitalism — two oppressive structures that were intimately linked.
We need radical change to address climate change. But degrowth needlessly shackles its vision of a socialist future to a program of aggregate reduction.
German Social Democratic Party leader Saskia Esken has boycotted a Bernie Sanders event over his supposedly anti-Israel statements. Bernie’s statement? “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.”
German workers fighting for a fair contract with Amazon could transform the service sector on a global scale.
The early German socialists fought for the persecuted at home and abroad — convinced that the liberation of workers in Germany was linked to the liberation of oppressed peoples around the globe.
Rossana Rossanda died last month after decades of commitment to first the Italian Communist Party and then the dissident manifesto group. She insisted that a left party should be shaped by the demands of workers' everyday struggles.
The Italian Communist Party was founded 100 years ago today. One of its most remarkable early militants was Francesco Misiano — a keen internationalist who fought gun in hand in the German Revolution before becoming a leading light of Soviet cinema.
Karl Marx famously wrote that “the workers have no country” — but he immediately added that they had to become “the leading class in the nation.” For over a century, the Left has struggled to reconcile the two ideas.
For centuries, working-class people have been sent to die in wars for empire. The rich history of soldier revolt isn’t just about foreign policy — it’s about breaking the power of the mighty in society as a whole.
There’s a long and rich tradition of the Left’s opposition to militarism that dates back to the First International. It’s an excellent resource for understanding the origins of war under capitalism and helping leftists maintain our clear opposition to it.