Is Russia Waking Up?

POLITICS AND IMPERIALIST INTERVENTION IN RUSSIA 

Aleksandr Buzgalin

MR Online | February 01, 2021

The following text was translated from Russian by Renfrey Clarke and has been edited for clarity. —Eds.

This text is being written in the heat of events immediately following the mass protests that occurred in most regions of Russia on 23 and 31 January 2021. The total number of protestors throughout the country on 23 January was put by the authorities at fewer than 10,000, but by the opposition much more. The largest of the demonstrations was, as usual, the one in Moscow, where according to the official count 4,000 people came onto the streets, while unofficial figures put much bigger number. Similar numbers took part in the protests on 31 January, but this time the clashes were much more fierce, and according to various accounts between 2000 and 4000 people were detained.

Exclusive emails show how the White Helmets tried to recruit Roger Waters with Saudi money

by Max Blumenthal

Gray Zone | April 19, 2018

During a Barcelona concert on April 13, Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” Warning that the groups’ unverified claims about chemical weapons attacks across insurgent-held territory were aimed at triggering Western military intervention, Waters cautioned his audience, “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”

Red scientist: two strands from a life in three colours

by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose

Verso | October 07, 2017

From Felix Topolski’s Conference Sketchbook: International Congress of Intellectuals for Peace (Wroctaw, Poland, 1948). Left to right: J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, Ivor Montagu, Hewlett Johnson (behind him, Julian Huxley), J.B.S. Haldane.

First published by Verso in 1999, J.D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics, edited by Francis Aprahamian and Brenda Swann, brings together 13 essays that survey the life and work of the pioneering Marxist molecular biologist and crystallographer. In the article below, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose trace the arc of Bernal’s career.

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review | Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg.(The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 240)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”¹ Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.

The Great Struggle to Escape Capitalism

by Bernard D’Mello

Monthly Review | Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

The crisis of the ruling order that unfolded in Russia in 1917 brought on an enormous social upheaval, culminating in a revolution—a process of fundamental transformation of the society’s socioeconomic and political structures and institutions. This revolution—history’s first major attempt to transcend capitalism—inevitably provoked a counterrevolution that sought to turn back the clock. Such life-and-death struggles have recurred in the periphery and semi-periphery of the world capitalist system since 1917, right up to the present.

In what follows—going by the dictum that the truth is the whole, but without trying to achieve the impossible, comprehensiveness—I look at revolution and counterrevolution as interdependent processes, the latter inevitably accompanying the former, and whose principal base has been in imperialism. I stress the fact that post-revolutionary society, in its efforts to combat counterrevolution, not only had to overcome the appalling heritage of the past, but was also confronted with its own contradictions, and with the persistent threat that an exploiting class could reemerge. Instead of the intended socialization of the economy and democratization of the polity, what resulted was (largely) state ownership of the economy and stultifying bureaucratization of both the economy and the polity, a cultural revolution in China notwithstanding.

Kendeng Against Cement

by Andre Barahamin

MR Online | 27 March, 2017

Since March 13, 2017, over 50 local indigenous peasants known as Sedulur Kendeng have been sitting with their feet in cement boxes in protest. This is their second such protest in eleven months.

It is both a symbolic and literal plea to President Joko Widodo, more commonly known as Jokowi, to halt the construction of a cement factory in Rembang, Central Java. They are protesting against the planned mining operation of PT Semen Indonesia—a state owned enterprise. The mega-plan is supported by Ganjar Pranowo, the Central Governor of Java, and Rini Soemarno, the Minister of State-owned Enterprises. Both are politicians from PDIP (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) who led Jokowi to his presidency back in 2014.

Bears and Musical Chairs

by Victor Grossman

MR Online | 11 February, 2017

Those who, like me, grew up with the writings of A. A. Milne may recall not just Winnie the Pooh but two other little bears and how “one of them was Bad and the other was Good” and kept getting better.  In a way, that recalls German politics. The goodie in next September’s elections, it had seemed, would certainly be Angela Merkel with her two “Christian” parties, one in Bavaria, the other in all the other states. And despite scolding from her own rightists due to her refugee policy, now backtracking, she was well ahead in the polls, heading towards a fourth term.