Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
“On the 150th anniversary of the defeat of the Paris Commune we assert that the Commune is not dead, retracing its influence through the workers’ and revolutionary movements until today.”
“The body is on the ground, but the idea is still standing”.
That was the response that the Versailles troops (...)
On April 25, 1974, a mutiny in the Portuguese army put an end to five decades of dictatorship. The revolution that followed showed how working people can take a modern economy into their own hands. David Broder spoke to historian Raquel Varela about its legacy for Portugal today.
Today, marks (...)
Anti-militarism in the 1920s was the spearhead of social democracy in the Netherlands and Belgium, and it was strongly supported by the trade union movement. However, their support was slowly but surely abandoned in the early 1930s, because it was a breakingpoint for the civil parties with whom (...)
We remember the students, the generational conflict, the cultural explosion—but we forget that it was, at heart, a working-class rebellion.
On the morning of June 10, 1968—a couple of weeks after French labor unions signed an agreement with Prime Minister Georges Pompidou to put an end to a (...)
How to bring to life what was the decade 1965-1975, its stakes in the world and in France, its scope, our commitments, our activist universe? By its analysis certainly, but larded with a lived experience, necessarily more personal. The exercise is delicate, with this constant coming and going (...)
Understanding the Spanish 68 requires an understanding of the rise of anti-Francoism in the previous years and its evolution after the state of exception declared in January 1969.
1968 is a prominent year in the popular history of the twentieth century. To think about it in relation to the (...)
In the decade from 1964 to 1974, just before the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, time accelerated in the Spanish state. It was the final years of the Franco regime. A time when changes around in the world were multiplying. A time when new experiences were proliferating, led by the (...)
For a few brief weeks in France, not just a government but an entire system was called into question.
On May 10, the “Night of the Barricades,” Belgian socialist Ernest Mandel was in Paris, addressing student protesters about to face down riot police in the Latin Quarter. Mandel finished his (...)
Over the past decades, we constantly observe the phantasmagorical conversion of the values of 1968 into their polar opposites. The events of 1968 have been stripped of their meaning and are now more a symbol of capitulation than revolution. Accepting this is the first step to making its legacy relevant again.
The 50th anniversary of the events of 1968 has not provoked a welter of emotions. I have in mind, of course, not academic and cultural commemorations. Depoliticised, the spirit of (...)
This rebellious era shaped radical activists – and aggressive capitalists. What can we learn from 1968, for democratic change today?
Capitalist adventurer Richard Branson and cultural and political rebel Tariq Ali were both shaped by the experiences of 1968 – and, significantly, the years that (...)
May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France by Mitchell Abidor. AK Press, 2018.
Where are the riots of yesteryear?
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the wave of radical revolts and revolutionary uprisings that startled the world in 1968 and which, although ultimately (...)
None of the key events of 1968 happened in Britain, but they impacted dramatically on the configuration of the Left. One socialist journal said it was “the year the ice cracked”. But more realistically it was the culmination of a process of left political renewal started in 1956 when the near-simultaneous Hungarian revolution and the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt shook the British Left to its core, resulting in the emergence of the “first” New Left. Revolutionary Renaissance
In the (...)
1968 was a historic year, but not in the sense of a unique moment in a linear march of history. The experiences of that year – and significantly, the years that preceded and followed – shaped a generation but produced ways of thinking that, in retrospect, have turned out to be both ambivalent and (...)
It’s been five years since the massive occupation of May 15, 2011 that gave birth to the movement of los indignados, 15M. Five years of faltering progress with many advances and set-backs along the way. Five years of a tremendous crisis, civil unrest and mass protest. So, what remains today (...)
The revolutionary period sparked by the 1916 Easter Rising offered a vision of a truly democratic Ireland.
There is no consensus among Ireland’s historians about whether the events of 1916-23 constitute a revolution, or how the revolution should be regarded.
Fianna Fáil , for a long time the (...)
Maurice Walsh’s Bitter Freedom is a revealing exploration of the Irish independence struggle in its international context, after the 1916 Easter Rising, finds Kieran Crowe.
Maurice Walsh, Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World (Faber and Faber 2016), 544pp.
Despite a crowded field of (...)
As the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising approaches, Counterfire is running a new 3-part series by Chris Bambery on the struggle for Irish independence.
I. Home Rule and the roots of the Rising
The centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 was always going to stir controversy, both in (...)
Geoffrey Bell writes about the Easter Rising and the response of the British left. His latest book, Hesitant Comrades, the Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement, has just been published by Pluto Press.
Just before he was executed for his part in Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916 James (...)
Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement by Geoffrey Bell (Pluto Press, 273pp, £17) reviewed by Andy Stowe.
SOMETIMES HESITANT, SOMETIMES TREACHEROUS
Jeremy Corbyn finds himself in the tricky position of being the anti-austerity leader of a party which is rather (...)
In September I accompanied Suzanne Weiss on a research trip concerning the work of anti-Nazi resistance in France 1940-45 to save Jewish children. Suzanne’s work took an unexpected turn, becoming part of present debate on attitudes to refugees. Here is her report. — John Riddell Toronto, 1 (...)
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