Revolution Follow

Revolutions are bad things. Or at least the social ones are. Revolutions are fine if they are restricted to political changes at the top. Then only the icing on the cake is changed. As the French revolutionary Babeuf once said, these revolutions take one set of robbers and replace them with another.

"The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events.

The revolutionary upsurge in Europe during and after the First World War threw the trade union movement across the continent into a profound upheaval.

The Russian Revolution is one of the most important events in world history and has inspired many debates, articles and books.

It was socialist women who made the first international appeal against the First World War, at a March 1915 conference organised by German revolutionary Clara Zetkin in Switzerland.

Where movements contain real revolutionary potential, they create popular institutions that attract mass support.

Central to the project of socialist revolution is the idea that working people should run every aspect of society, developing their own democratic organisations as a new form of power.

The prominent role of revolutionaries from Asia in the Communist International marked a breakthrough for the world socialist movement.

We discussed last week how mass movements can transform the lives of their participants – and how they thus contain the possibility, but not the inevitability, of revolution.

Good sense at Gramsci school Over 90 people attended a dayschool on the revolutionary legacy of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in Edinburgh last Saturday.

John Riddell, the pre-eminent historian of the Communist Third International, continues his series by looking at the Comintern's attempt to build a worldwide party while avoiding the mistakes of the Second International

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggested two reasons why revolution is necessary.