Why do Marxists want to abolish the family? Engels described the emergence of the patriarchal family as humanity’s first counterrevolution. In this talk, Fred Weston, editor of marxist.com, presents a Marxist perspective on the family and its origins.

This week Joel is joined by editor of La Riposte socialiste, Julien Arseneau, to bring a Marxist analysis to the largest PSAC strike in 30 years. What are the demands the workers are fighting for? What is the significance of the strike for the Canadian class struggle? And how do the workers win?

The assassination of Trotsky in August 1940 dealt a devastating blow to the young and untested forces of the Fourth International. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Fourth were not up to the level of the tasks posed by history. Deprived of Trotsky's leadership they made a series of fundamental mistakes. Only the leadership of the RCP in Britain was able to readjust to the new situation on a world scale after 1945. This was the result of the theoretical capabilities of Ted Grant. His writings on economics, war, the colonial revolution, and particularly Stalinism, were, and still remain, classics of modern Marxism.

In the 1950s the Indonesian economy was failing, with the division between rich and poor increasing sharply. At the same time the PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, grew to the third largest Communist Party in the world, with three million paid members and the support of ten million trade unionists and organized peasants. Sadly this explosive combination ended in the massacre of 1 million communists in 1965. Indonesia is a graphic example of how mistakes in theory have dire consequences.

In this talk from the 2023 Montreal Marxist Winter School, IMT activist Mike Leiden discusses the lessons of the Indonesian Revolution.

This week, Joel is joined by International Marxist Tendency activist Ted Sprague to talk about so-called "Chinese interference" in Canadian election, actual CSIS interference in Canadian politics, and growing imperialist rivalry between China and western capitalist powers.

Listen to Fightback editor Alex Grant on Cheri DiNovo's "Left, Lefter, Leftist". This month: Cheri, Alex, Curtis Jordan and Gary Kinsman discuss transit, homelessness, and the Toronto mayoral election

You can also listen on the CIUT website, here.

The American Revolution was a dialectically complex, and profound political and social revolution, which rooted out most of the remaining traces of monarchic rule and feudalism inherited from the only partially complete English bourgeois revolution. Unfortunately, the Revolution has been reduced to a summer barbecue on the 4th of July that completely ignores the real class roots of this world-shaking event.

In this talk, Fightback activist Kian provides a Marxist analysis, to understand the inner contradictions, the fundamental forces, processes, and class struggles that motivated and drove the revolution. 

The question of how the US working class will create a party of its own—a class-independent, mass socialist party—has been a foremost concern of Marxists since the earliest beginnings of the movement, both in the US and around the world. Reactionaries have long pointed to the lack of a working-class party as an indication of “American exceptionalism” and the weakness of the class struggle in the land of McCarthy. Meanwhile, revolutionaries have tirelessly maintained that a mass workers’ party is an objective historical step that must be achieved in order for the US working class to fight back effectively and reverse decades of lost ground in the class struggle.

In this talk from the 2023 Montreal Marxist Winter School, Tom Trottier, editor of Socialist Revolution, discusses the struggle for a workers' party in the USA.

The history of Bolshevism has many vital lessons for today’s revolutionaries – particularly regarding the origins of the revolutionary party that led the masses to victory in Russia. At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, the famous split between the majority (Bolsheviks) and minority (Mensheviks) took place. Many myths and distortion surround this split. It is often wrongly alleged the Mensheviks stood for a ‘democratic’ and ‘decentralized’ party, in opposition to Lenin’s ‘ultra-centralist’ and ‘authoritarian’ tendencies. In reality, this split on organizational questions was an anticipation of future political differences, which will lead the Mensheviks to betray the revolution.

This talk was given by Fightback editor Alex Grant at the 2023 Montreal Marxist Winter School.