History and Traditions

  • The revolution gains strength

    After the February Revolution, two powers existed in Russia--the Provisional Government and the workers' councils.

  • A world to win

    Marx and Engels summarized their ideas in the most famous revolutionary pamphlet of all times, published as the revolutions of 1848 began.

  • Talking about Socialism

    The Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago on June 27-30 will bring together hundreds of people seeking to understand the world--and how to change it.

  • The revolt against the Tsar's empire

    How did the 1917 Russian Revolution affect the vast empire of oppressed nations that had been subjected to Tsarist rule?

  • Recommended at Left Forum

    SocialistWorker.org contributors and supporters will be speaking at sessions at the Left Forum on June 7-9 in New York.

  • Karl Marx, radical environmentalist

    Activists today have much to gain by engaging with the ecological critique of capitalism developed by Marx and Engels in the 19th century.

  • How workers' power was organized

    The workers' council system created in Russia in 1917 provided the platform for full democracy and liberation.

  • Ready for the revolutionary wave

    Marx and Engels could sense the upheavals of 1848 ahead--and prepared by building organizations to stand for socialist ideas.

  • Lenin prepares the Bolsheviks

    By late April 1917, the Bolsheviks stood out as the one major political party committed to workers' self-emancipation.

  • The February Revolution

    The barbarism of war and the tyranny of Tsarist rule inspired the Russian working class to rebellion in February 1917.

  • Speaking with Karl Marx

    In 1879, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune sat down with the "cornerstone of modern socialism" for an interview.

  • How the stage was set for revolution

    This first installment in a series on the Russian Revolution explains the events and factors leading up to the 1917 uprising.

  • Memories of the Commune

    A leader of the Paris Commune of 1871 describes the scenes of workers seizing power and creating a new order.

  • The poverty of Proudhon's anarchism

    In a short book critiquing an anarchist thinker, Marx clarified his understanding that there could be no individual or partial solution to exploitation.

  • The martyred apostles of labor

    An American working-class leader honors the legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs and the history of the celebration of May Day.

  • Race in the Obama era

    The election of the first Black president marked a historic blow against racism, but Black America still endures systematic oppression.

  • Their heads held high

    An inspirational teacher-activist who encouraged Chicano students to organize against education inequity died on April 15.

  • Muck, filth, phantoms and revolution

    The German Ideology shows Marx and Engels' developing views on history, capitalism and working-class revolution.

  • Racism in a "color-blind" society

    We're told that we live in a "post-racial" society, but racism is alive and well in the U.S.--and benefiting the capitalist system in important ways.

  • Race and politics in the post-civil rights era

    Race and racism has always been central to U.S. politics--and that didn't stop with the victories of the civil rights movement.

  • Strikes and the working class

    The Russian revolutionary describes the significance of strikes to the working-class movement and the fight for socialism.

  • Remembering the Great Miners' Strike

    In 1984, Margaret Thatcher and her government embarked on as tough and crude a class battle as had ever been attempted.

  • Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition

    Jackson's 1980s campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination showed the new hold of electoralism in Black politics.

  • Political indifferentism

    If socialists are trying to make a revolution, does that mean they are indifferent to the bourgeois state or demands for reform?

  • Taking us to the mountaintop

    Martin Luther King's speech in Memphis before he was killed is a dissertation on history, humanity, love and revolution.