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This groundbreaking study rediscovers the socialists of Tsarist Russia’s imperial borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics, the Russian Revolution, and Second International socialism. Based on archival research in eight languages,
Revolutionary Social Democracy is the first comparative account of the numerous socialist parties that fought for democracy and workers’ power across the entire span of the Russian Empire, from the factories of Warsaw, to the oil fields of Baku, to the autonomous parliament of Finland. By demonstrating that the Russian Revolution was far less Russian than commonly assumed, Eric Blanc challenges long-held assumptions of historians, sociologists, and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change under autocratic and democratic conditions.
This groundbreaking study rediscovers the socialists of Tsarist Russia’s imperial borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics, the Russian Revolution, and Second International socialism. Based on archival research in eight languages,
Revolutionary Social Democracy is the first comparative account of the numerous socialist parties that fought for democracy and workers’ power across the entire span of the Russian Empire, from the factories of Warsaw, to the oil fields of Baku, to the autonomous parliament of Finland. By demonstrating that the Russian Revolution was far less Russian than commonly assumed, Eric Blanc challenges long-held assumptions of historians, sociologists, and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change under autocratic and democratic conditions.
Abstract
This article challenges widespread uncritical portrayals of Rosa Luxemburg. By examining the politics and practices of Luxemburg and her SDKPiL party in Poland, I show that their commitment to proletarian emancipation was undermined by sectarian and doctrinaire tendencies that contributed to the defeat of Poland’s workers’ revolutions in 1905 and 1918–19. A critical analysis of their approaches to the national question, the Polish Socialist Party, German Social Democracy, and the role of the revolutionary party, undermines the prevailing romanticisation of Luxemburg. I argue that the Polish Socialist Party, Luxemburg’s main political rival, posed a viable Marxist alternative for Poland’s revolutionary movement.
Abstract
Bringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers’ strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, and the potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future.