Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Assessing Trotsky

A book review Good Communist Homes

A good analysis, but with a disappointment. Bellamy speaks of the "periphery" and "weak link", but has not touched at all on a major series of recent uprisings which have taken place in "the periphery". The US, Britain, Russia, France with their allies like the Saudi monarchy and the UAE have played a major role in the counter-revolution of aborting or diverting the uprisings (or "revolution") in the Arab countries. The only mention of counterrevolution was half a sentence about the "Islamic State" as a product of geopolitics. Revolution and counterevolution - 1917-2017

China Miéville's book October "is  very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover." John Medherst: " As someone with a book on the Russian Revolution out later this year (August 17th) with a different and more critical take on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I had to buy and read China Mieville’s October. It is, as you would expect, a great read. Vivid and immersive, it skilfully recreates how kinetic, stressful, confusing and exciting February-October 1917 in Russia must have been. But it is very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover. Although it has a brief prologue and epilogue, 95% of the book sticks tightly to the nine months of February-October. As such it is, surprisingly for a Marxist writer, a rather old-fashioned narrative history. Considering that nearly all the main issues and controversies of the Bolshevik revolution arise from events post-October, the decision to barely address that period prevents wide...

" To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." The Russian Revolution: What's Left?