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Forty years since the death of Che Guevara – Part Two

Che Guevara was a dedicated revolutionary and Communist. He was also an
internationalist and understood that to defend the Cuban revolution it
was necessary to spread it to other parts of the world. He attempted
this in Africa and Latin America. This was his strong side. His weak
side was that he saw the revolution fundamentally as a peasant
guerrilla struggle and did not fully understand the central role of the
working class in the socialist revolution.

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Forty years since the death of Che Guevara – Part One

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was executed by Bolivian troops near the town of La Higuera on 9 October 1967, following an ambush. The operation was planned by the CIA and organized by US Special Forces. On the 40th anniversary of his death it is appropriate that we make a balance sheet of this outstanding revolutionary and martyr. Alan Woods in a two-part article looks at the evolution of Che Guevara from his early days to the day he was killed.

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Che Guevara: Martyr and Revolutionary

Forty years ago this month, in a small school hut in La Higuera,
Bolivia, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was brutally executed by the Bolivian
army. Since Che’s death, the popular media have tried to
assimilate his image and turn it into a harmless symbol. They have,
however, not succeeded in burying the memory of Che, just as they have
not managed to solve the problems of poverty and destitution in the
third world.

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This land is our land! The story of the Kinder Scout mass trespass in 1932

Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire peak
District is one of the most beautiful areas in Britain. The high
moorland has no farming value, yet working people were denied all
access. The area was reserved for grouse shooting, a hobby of the
rich. In the Great Depression after 1929,
walking and cycling were two of the only leisure activities young
workers could afford. On April 24th Benny Rothman
led the mass trespass that eventually gave chunks of ‘our’
country back to us.

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Ted Grant: In Defence of Trotskyism

Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
– including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.

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The Crime of Partition – part 3: The role of the Communist Party of India during Partition

Could the Communist party of India have made a decisive difference in the independence movement? Here Jamil shows they were above all the prisoners of the policies imposed by Stalin, which were normally reformist, indeed counter-revolutionary. But occasionally Stalin lurched into an ultra-left phase as in 1947-48, called the ‘Zhdanov offensive.’ In lurching from right to left, a drunk will at one point be found upright. That is the significance of the correct perception of what was happening in India by the Moscow commentators Dyakov and Zhukov.

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Leon Trotsky – revolutionary martyr

Leon Trotsky’s murder was no accident or spontaneous action by the dictator Stalin, but
a monstrous preconceived act that was the culmination of a murder campaign against
the whole of the old Bolshevik leadership of the revolution and those who stood
by the genuine ideas of Marxism. We republish this article published in Militant in 1985.

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How it Happened

Today is the 67th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky. Together
with Lenin, Trotsky was one of the great Marxist theoreticians of the
20th century, who dedicated his life to the emancipation of the working
class. Not only did he work for the overthrow of capitalism, but also
for the overthrow of Stalinism, a monstrous totalitarian regime which
held the Russian working class in submission. As a consequence, Stalin
sought during the Purge Trials to murder the entire leadership of the
Bolshevik party, and ordered the assassination of Leon Trotsky. After
the failed attempt in May 1940, Stalins assassin eventually succeeded
in murdering Trotsky on the 20th of August in Mexico city. Today we
publish Natalya Sedov Trotskys original account of the assasination.

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[Ted Grant Archive – Update] British Refuse Arms to Indians

The threatened invasion of India by Japanese imperialism in 1942
brought the question of India front and centre before the British
working class. Rather than arm the Indian people and risk India falling
into the hands of the Indians, the British imperialists would have
prefered it to fall, temporarily, into the hands of the Japanese.

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[Ted Grant Archive – Update] The I.L.P. – A Ship Without a Compass

In the middle of the war the ILP was floundering. Not having
a fully worked out Marxist programme, it combined opportunism and sectarianism
at the same time. They could not understand the method as outlined by Ted Grant
at the time, which was not to issue mere denunciations of the Labour Party
leaders. It could "only be done by demonstrating to the masses, by their own
experience, that their leaders are incapable of representing their interests."

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