Articles

Adapted and translated by Gregor Benton and Ingrid Hanon

The second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe has enjoyed a degree of popularity in Italy since the late 1970s.

In the 1890s, the idea of a “record industry” was a novel concept. The phonograph had only been invented in 1877, its close cousin the gramophone patented and made available for purchase little more than a decade later. The notion that you could hear a sound at a time other than when it was being created? Until recently, this had been beyond the pale of possibility, akin to the first decades of the photograph, just starting to shift the sonic and cultural contours of daily life.

Richard Müller (1880–1943) was a German lathe operator, union organiser, and revolutionary who led the Revolutionary Shop Stewards during World War I. In November 1918, he became Chairman of the Executive Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, effectively serving as head of state of the short-lived Socialist Republic of Germany. After losing influence in the Communist Party by 1921, he turned to writing, producing the classic three-volume history Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik (1924–25). Withdrawing from politics after 1925, he became a businessman and died in relative obscurity. For further discussion of Müller’s life and work, see the book by Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement.

Cathy Porter, author and translator, educated at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Cambridge University, has published over twenty books on Russian history, culture and politics, most recently Larisa Reisner. A Biography (2nd ed., Brill/Historical Materialism/Haymarket, 2022), shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and its accompanying volume Writings of Larisa Reisner, her six books, translated with Richard Chappell, again for the Historical Materialism Book Series. Author of Alexandra Kollontai. A Biography, first published in 1978, she is also a translator of Kollontai’s fictional trilogies Love of Worker Bees and A Great Love. This interview was originally published in About Narration (1975): Materials, Comments, Interventions, Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, Rab-Rab Press, 2025

Spectacular society

The following text is based on an intervention at the conference Historical Materialism Paris: Conjuring the Catastrophe / Combating the Catastrophe, held from 26 to 28 June 2025. 

Richard Löwenthal (1908-1991) was a German Jewish writer and political scientist. In the Weimar Republic he belonged to the Communist youth movement and then to a revolutionary splinter group called the Leninist Organisation, also known as New Beginning. He helped organise underground resistance to the Nazi regime before he was forced into exile. He published a series of critical essays on fascism and Stalinism, which he interpreted as twin totalitarian efforts to repress class struggle. Eventually arriving in London, he aided the British war effort and helped broker peace between German Social Democrats and leftwing splinter groups in exile. After the war, he worked as a correspondent for Reuters and the Observer, covering developments in world communism. Eventually he resettled in West Germany, where he was named professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin. One of his students there was the New Left leader Rudi Dutschke. By the 1960s, however, Löwenthal had evolved from revolutionary socialist into defender of the democratic establishment.

Nepal has been in the news. Gen Z agitators, who began agitations following a ban on several social media platforms, were rooted in public anger at corruption and display of wealth by government figures and their families, and complaints about mismanagement of public funds. This is hardly the full story, which needs to be discussed at length. What is significant however, is that these agitations come after a protracted period of government by various parties and Prime Ministers claiming to be communist.

There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s ferocious genocidal war on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimate its formation and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1947-1949, which the revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has deemed ‘ethnic cleansing’, an ongoing lethal project that has accelerated since 7 October 2023.[1] Characterising Israel as a European colonial settler state, a characterisation first elaborated by the French Jewish scholar Maxime Rodinson in June 1967,[2] this article traces Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust as ‘myth’, i.e. as state legitimation, and considers how this has impeded criticism of Israel’s relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine. The issue here, of course, is not the fact of the Holocaust, but of its representation and manipulation.

It is perhaps the most dramatic and iconic scene of the October revolution. At the Second Congress in Petrograd, the Bolshevik Trotsky points his finger at the exit and thunders to the Menshevik Martov: ‘Go! You are miserable bankrupts who belong in the dustbin of history.’ And Martov and the Mensheviks leave, with fateful consequences. Later, the arresting phrase ‘dustbin of history’ (along with many equivalents!) becomes part of the English language (in North American English, the word ‘dustbin’ occurs only in this celebrated phrase).