review
The transformation of South Africa's communists
Raising the Red Flag: The International Socialist League and the Communist Party of South Africa 1914-1932
By Sheridan Johns
Mayibuye Books, Bellville, South Africa
1995, 309pp.
Review by Norm Dixon
Mayibuye Books specialise in publishing works relating to South Africa's liberation struggle, most by participants in the movement. Under apartheid many valuable works were suppressed. Now free to publish anything, it may seem strange that Mayibuye would decide to publish a book that began as an unpublished thesis by an obscure US academic 30 years ago. Strange or not, it is a decision to be welcomed.
Three books on the life and thought of the `red terror doctor’
Reviews by Alex Miller
Karl Marx: A Biography
By
David McLellan, Palgrave Macmillan
4th
Edition 2006
487
pages, paperback
Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: Critiques of Stalinism `from the left’?
Review by Alex Miller
This essay is the result of a re-reading of George Orwell’s two most famous novels. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have acquired the status of textbooks, and are routinely used in schools to demonstrate to children the inherent dangers of social revolution. It is time for a reappraisal.
The ``Centenary Edition’’ of George Orwell’s Animal Farm contains a preface written by Orwell for the first edition (Secker and Warburg, 1945) but never published, together with a preface that he wrote specially for a translation for displaced Ukrainians living under British and US administration after World War II.
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Marxism or Bauerite nationalism?
By Doug Lorimer
- Historical materialist theory
- Bauer's theory of nations
- Necessary but not sufficient characteristics
- 'Cultural-national autonomy'
- Oppressed and oppressor nations
- Reactionary consequences of the subjectivist theory
- Footnotes
Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question is a collection of essays written over the last 24 years by Michael Löwy, director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. The book was published under the auspices of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education, founded by Ernest Mandel and other leaders of the Trotskyist Fourth International.